# Exploring the Role of Synthetic Data Augmentation in Controllable Human-Centric Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21291 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21291/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08891/) (2023)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [CAD2RL: Real Single-Image Flight without a Single Real Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04201/) (2016)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [Fake it till you make it: Learning transferable representations from synthetic ImageNet clones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08420/) (2022)
- [Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party: A Speaker-Independent Audio-Visual Model for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03619/) (2018)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00040/) (2023)

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

- [Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18184/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Controllable human video generation aims to produce realistic videos of humans with explicitly guided motions and appearances,serving as a foundation for digital humans, animation, and embodied AI.However, the scarcity of largescale, diverse, and privacy safe human video datasets poses a major bottleneck, especially for rare identities and complex actions.Synthetic data provides a scalable and controllable alternative,yet its actual contribution to generative modeling remains underexplored due to the persistent Sim2Real gap.In this work,we systematically investigate the impact of synthetic data on controllable human video generation. We propose a diffusion-based framework that enables fine-grained control over appearance and motion while providing a unfied testbed to analyze how synthetic data interacts with real world data during training. Through extensive experiments, we reveal the complementary roles of synthetic and real data and demonstrate possible methods for efficiently selecting synthetic samples to enhance motion realism,temporal consistency,and identity preservation.Our study offers the first comprehensive exploration of synthetic data's role in human-centric video synthesis and provides practical insights for building data-efficient and generalizable generative models.