# Inference-time Stochastic Refinement of GRU-Normalizing Flow for Real-time Video Motion Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04282/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [A Recurrent Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02216/) (2015)
- [Stochastic Video Generation with a Learned Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07687/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Variational Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11252/) (2017)
- [Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14367/) (2022)
- [Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08861/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Adversarial Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01523/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06707/) (2020)
- [Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting via Conditioned Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06103/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Visual Planning with Temporal Skip Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05268/) (2017)
- [A Review on Deep Learning Techniques for Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05214/) (2020)
- [On the Anatomy of MCMC-Based Maximum Likelihood Learning of Energy-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12370/) (2019)
- [Discriminator Rejection Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06758/) (2018)
- [Towards Efficient Real-Time Video Motion Transfer via Generative Time Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05537/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unsupervised Keypoints for Real-Time Fall Detection: Comparative Analysis Under Real-world Conditions with Predictive Bandwidth Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15400/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time video motion transfer applications such as immersive gaming and vision-based anomaly detection require accurate yet diverse future predictions to support realistic synthesis and robust downstream decision making under uncertainty. To improve the diversity of such sequential forecasts we propose a novel inference-time refinement technique that combines Gated Recurrent Unit-Normalizing Flows (GRU-NF) with stochastic sampling methods. While GRU-NF can capture multimodal distributions through its integration of normalizing flows within a temporal forecasting framework, its deterministic transformation structure can limit expressivity. To address this, inspired by Stochastic Normalizing Flows (SNF), we introduce Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) steps during GRU-NF inference, enabling the model to explore a richer output space and better approximate the true data distribution without retraining. We validate our approach in a keypoint-based video motion transfer pipeline, where capturing temporally coherent and perceptually diverse future trajectories is essential for realistic samples and low bandwidth communication. Experiments show that our inference framework, Gated Recurrent Unit- Stochastic Normalizing Flows (GRU-SNF) outperforms GRU-NF in generating diverse outputs without sacrificing accuracy, even under longer prediction horizons. By injecting stochasticity during inference, our approach captures multimodal behavior more effectively. These results highlight the potential of integrating stochastic dynamics with flow-based sequence models for generative time series forecasting. The code is available at: https://github.com/Tasmiah1408028/Inference-Time-Stochastic-Refinement-Of-GRU-NF-For-Real-Time-Video-Motion-Transfer