# SAMA: Factorized Semantic Anchoring and Motion Alignment for Instruction-Guided Video Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09535/) (2023)
- [TokenFlow: Consistent Diffusion Features for Consistent Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10373/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13077/) (2023)
- [Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04761/) (2023)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [Rerender A Video: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Video-to-Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07954/) (2023)
- [AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15738/) (2024)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)
- [TokenFlow: Unified Image Tokenizer for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03069/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [FadeMem: Distance-Aware Memory Consolidation for Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10671/) (2026)
- [Vidu S2: Real-Time Interactive, Editable, and Spatial Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11638/) (2026)
- [Power Reinforcement Post-Training of Text-to-Image Models with Super-Linear Advantage Shaping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10937/) (2026)
- [CoinVE-200K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Compositional Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17566/) (2026)
- [Occlusion-Aware Physics-Semantic Keyframe Selection for Robust Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23192/) (2026)
- [LongLive-Plug: Once-for-All Distillation for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38154/) (2026)
- [ThinkV2V: Unleashing the Reasoning Capability of MLLMs for Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38541/) (2026)
- [Transforming Image Editors into Video Editors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11037/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current instruction-guided video editing models struggle to simultaneously balance precise semantic modifications with faithful motion preservation. While existing approaches rely on injecting explicit external priors (e.g., VLM features or structural conditions) to mitigate these issues, this reliance severely bottlenecks model robustness and generalization. To overcome this limitation, we present SAMA (factorized Semantic Anchoring and Motion Alignment), a framework that factorizes video editing into semantic anchoring and motion modeling. First, we introduce Semantic Anchoring, which establishes a reliable visual anchor by jointly predicting semantic tokens and video latents at sparse anchor frames, enabling purely instruction-aware structural planning. Second, Motion Alignment pre-trains the same backbone on motion-centric video restoration pretext tasks (cube inpainting, speed perturbation, and tube shuffle), enabling the model to internalize temporal dynamics directly from raw videos. SAMA is optimized with a two-stage pipeline: a factorized pre-training stage that learns inherent semantic-motion representations without paired video-instruction editing data, followed by supervised fine-tuning on paired editing data. Remarkably, the factorized pre-training alone already yields strong zero-shot video editing ability, validating the proposed factorization. SAMA achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models and is competitive with leading commercial systems (e.g., Kling-Omni). Code, models, and datasets will be released.