# MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [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)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Character Region Awareness for Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01941/) (2019)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02646/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06025/) (2023)
- [Direct-a-Video: Customized Video Generation with User-Directed Camera Movement and Object Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03162/) (2024)
- [Deformable GANs for Pose-based Human Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00055/) (2017)
- [DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00040/) (2023)
- [Training-free Camera Control for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10126/) (2024)
- [MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12052/) (2023)
- [DwNet: Dense warp-based network for pose-guided human video generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09139/) (2019)

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

- [DepthArb: Training-Free Depth-Arbitrated Generation for Occlusion-Robust Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23924/) (2026)
- [AnyID: Ultra-Fidelity Universal Identity-Preserving Video Generation from Any Visual References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25188/) (2026)
- [WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36937/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Character image animation, which synthesizes videos of reference characters driven by pose sequences, has advanced rapidly but remains largely limited to single-human settings. Existing methods struggle to generalize to multi-humanoid scenarios, which involve diverse humanoid forms, complex interactions, and frequent occlusions. We address this gap with two key innovations. First, we introduce unified motion representations that extract identity-agnostic motions and explicitly bind them to corresponding characters, enabling generalization across diverse humanoid forms and seamless extension to multi-humanoid scenarios. Second, we propose a holistic 4D-anchored paradigm that constructs a shared 4D space to fuse motion representations with video latents, and further reinforces this process with hierarchical 4D-level supervision to better handle interactions and occlusions. We instantiate these ideas in MotionWeaver, an end-to-end framework for multi-humanoid image animation. To support this setting, we curate a 46-hour dataset of multi-human videos with rich interactions, and construct a 300-video benchmark featuring paired humanoid characters. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that MotionWeaver not only achieves state-of-the-art results on our benchmark but also generalizes effectively across diverse humanoid forms, complex interactions, and challenging multi-humanoid scenarios.