# EverybodyDance: Bipartite Graph-Based Identity Correspondence for Multi-Character Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16360 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16360/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09778/) (2022)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11018/) (2022)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05684/) (2023)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Temporal Generative Adversarial Nets with Singular Value Clipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06624/) (2016)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation by Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17440/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SafeGuard: A Multi-Agent Perception-Reasoning Framework for Social-Risk AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03069/) (2026)
- [MOJITO: Modal Joint Learning for Unified End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23511/) (2026)
- [WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36937/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Consistent pose-driven character animation has achieved remarkable progress in single-character scenarios. However, extending these advances to multi-character settings is non-trivial, especially when position swap is involved. Beyond mere scaling, the core challenge lies in enforcing correct Identity Correspondence (IC) between characters in reference and generated frames. To address this, we introduce EverybodyDance, a systematic solution targeting IC correctness in multi-character animation. EverybodyDance is built around the Identity Matching Graph (IMG), which models characters in the generated and reference frames as two node sets in a weighted complete bipartite graph. Edge weights, computed via our proposed Mask-Query Attention (MQA), quantify the affinity between each pair of characters. Our key insight is to formalize IC correctness as a graph structural metric and to optimize it during training. We also propose a series of targeted strategies tailored for multi-character animation, including identity-embedded guidance, a multi-scale matching strategy, and pre-classified sampling, which work synergistically. Finally, to evaluate IC performance, we curate the Identity Correspondence Evaluation benchmark, dedicated to multi-character IC correctness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EverybodyDance substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both IC and visual fidelity.
