# MotionAdapter: Video Motion Transfer via Content-Aware Attention Customization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01955/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 47 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)
- [MotionDirector: Motion Customization of Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08465/) (2023)
- [Direct-a-Video: Customized Video Generation with User-Directed Camera Movement and Object Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03162/) (2024)
- [Space-Time Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Text-Driven Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17009/) (2023)
- [MotionClone: Training-Free Motion Cloning for Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05338/) (2024)
- [FreeInit: Bridging Initialization Gap in Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07537/) (2023)
- [TrailBlazer: Trajectory Control for Diffusion-Based Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00896/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in diffusion-based text-to-video models, particularly those built on the diffusion transformer architecture, have achieved remarkable progress in generating high-quality and temporally coherent videos. However, transferring complex motions between videos remains challenging. In this work, we present MotionAdapter, a content-aware motion transfer framework that enables robust and semantically aligned motion transfer within DiT-based video diffusion models. Our key insight is that effective motion transfer requires 1) explicit disentanglement of motion from appearance and 2) adaptive customization of motion to target content. MotionAdapter first isolates motion by analyzing cross-frame attention within 3D full-attention modules to extract attention-derived motion fields. To bridge the semantic gap between reference and target videos, we further introduce a DINO-guided motion customization module that rearranges and refines motion fields based on content correspondences. The customized motion field is then used to guide the DiT denoising process, ensuring that the synthesized video inherits the reference motion while preserving target appearance and semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionAdapter outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Moreover, MotionAdapter naturely support complex motion transfer and motion editing tasks such as zooming in/out and composition.