# Moaw: Unleashing Motion Awareness for Video Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12761 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12761/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 30 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

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

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

- [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)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [MM-Diffusion: Learning Multi-Modal Diffusion Models for Joint Audio and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09478/) (2022)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [DepthCrafter: Generating Consistent Long Depth Sequences for Open-world Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02095/) (2024)
- [Diffusion as Shader: 3D-aware Video Diffusion for Versatile Video Generation Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03847/) (2025)
- [Stable Virtual Camera: Generative View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14489/) (2025)
- [SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04319/) (2024)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)
- [Geo4D: Leveraging Video Generators for Geometric 4D Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07961/) (2025)
- [DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24211/) (2024)
- [MFT: Long-Term Tracking of Every Pixel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12998/) (2023)
- [Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00786/) (2023)
- [MotionEditor: Editing Video Motion via Content-Aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18830/) (2023)
- [Video Motion Transfer with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07776/) (2024)
- [Emergent Temporal Correspondences from Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17220/) (2025)
- [SceneTracker: Long-term Scene Flow Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19924/) (2024)
- [AccFlow: Backward Accumulation for Long-Range Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13133/) (2023)
- [Training-Free Motion-Guided Video Generation with Enhanced Temporal Consistency Using Motion Consistency Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07563/) (2025)
- [MoTrans: Customized Motion Transfer with Text-driven Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01343/) (2024)
- [Taming generative video models for zero-shot optical flow extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09082/) (2025)

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

- [Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17248/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video diffusion models, trained on large-scale datasets, naturally capture correspondences of shared features across frames. Recent works have exploited this property for tasks such as optical flow prediction and tracking in a zero-shot setting. Motivated by these findings, we investigate whether supervised training can more fully harness the tracking capability of video diffusion models. To this end, we propose Moaw, a framework that unleashes motion awareness for video diffusion models and leverages it to facilitate motion transfer. Specifically, we train a diffusion model for motion perception, shifting its modality from image-to-video generation to video-to-dense-tracking. We then construct a motion-labeled dataset to identify features that encode the strongest motion information, and inject them into a structurally identical video generation model. Owing to the homogeneity between the two networks, these features can be naturally adapted in a zero-shot manner, enabling motion transfer without additional adapters. Our work provides a new paradigm for bridging generative modeling and motion understanding, paving the way for more unified and controllable video learning frameworks.