# Slot-ID: Identity-Preserving Video Generation from Reference Videos via Slot-Based Temporal Identity Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [BLIP-Diffusion: Pre-trained Subject Representation for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14720/) (2023)
- [InstantID: Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07519/) (2024)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [PhotoMaker: Customizing Realistic Human Photos via Stacked ID Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04461/) (2023)
- [LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09673/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00131/) (2024)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [Key-Locked Rank One Editing for Text-to-Image Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01644/) (2023)
- [DreamVideo: Composing Your Dream Videos with Customized Subject and Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04433/) (2023)
- [T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14505/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13872/) (2026)
- [Generate Your Talking Avatar from Video Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27918/) (2026)
- [BEACON: Behavior and Appearance Control for Subject-Specific Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13264/) (2026)
- [OmniVBench: A Benchmark and Large-Scale Dataset for Omni Reference-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22069/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human identity-preserving text-to-video generation remains challenging under large changes in viewpoint, facial expression, illumination, and motion. Existing methods condition the generator on a single reference portrait, but a static image cannot capture how identity-bearing cues evolve across views and expressions, leading to face deformation, pose locking, identity drift, or over-smoothed faces. We observe that a short reference clip naturally provides richer temporal and multi-view identity cues than any single image, motivating a video-referential formulation. This richer signal, however, introduces a new challenge: identity evidence is distributed across many frames and must be distilled into a compact, stable representation under a limited token budget. To this end, we propose Slot-ID, a lightweight identity-conditioning framework built on a frozen text-to-video backbone. Slot-ID employs a slot-based temporal identity encoder with Sinkhorn-routed iterative reading to distill a compact, stable set of identity tokens from the reference clip, complemented by an image-anchor stream for dual-source conditioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Slot-ID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity preservation and visual naturalness while remaining competitive in prompt following, with particularly large gains under challenging pose, expression, and motion variations.