# MultiAnimate: Pose-Guided Image Animation Made Extensible

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21581/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00131/) (2024)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04001/) (2025)
- [UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01188/) (2024)
- [StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17697/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10804/) (2026)
- [LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11745/) (2026)
- [UniMoCa: Unifying Motion and Camera Controls as Visual Proxies for Faithful Human Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01944/) (2026)
- [Vorch-IR: Long-Form Unified Multimodal Identity Replacement Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05648/) (2026)
- [PAI-Actor: Cinematic Multi-Character Replacement in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05918/) (2026)
- [WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36937/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pose-guided human image animation aims to synthesize realistic videos of a reference character driven by a sequence of poses. While diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable success, most existing approaches are limited to single-character animation. We observe that naively extending these methods to multi-character scenarios often leads to identity confusion and implausible occlusions between characters. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an extensible multi-character image animation framework built upon modern Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation. At its core, our framework introduces two novel components-Identifier Assigner and Identifier Adapter - which collaboratively capture per-person positional cues and inter-person spatial relationships. This mask-driven scheme, along with a scalable training strategy, not only enhances flexibility but also enables generalization to scenarios with more characters than those seen during training. Remarkably, trained on only a two-character dataset, our model generalizes to multi-character animation while maintaining compatibility with single-character cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-character image animation, surpassing existing diffusion-based baselines.