From Ideal to Real: Stable Video Object Removal under Imperfect Conditions

Video object removal aims to erase target objects while reconstructing visually plausible and temporally coherent content. However, target objects often induce shadows, reflections, illumination changes and other effects that extend beyond the provided mask, making conventional mask-conditioned completion prone to visible residuals. We therefore formulate side-effect-aware object removal as an understanding-guided process that integrates object--effect relations, affected-region localization, and context-aware reconstruction. Specifically, we introduce Object-Induced Relation Distillation to transfer token-level object--effect relations from a pretrained vision foundation model to the video diffusion model. We then design Object-aware Framewise Context Cross-Attention to combine target-object semantics with per-frame background context for removal and reconstruction, and propose Attention-guided Region Localization to derive a soft spatial prior over the target object and its affected regions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves more complete object-and-effect removal and outperforms existing approaches in removal quality, side-effect suppression, and temporal consistency.

Video object removal aims to eliminate dynamic target objects and their visual effects, such as deformation, shadows, and reflections, while restoring seamless backgrounds. Recent diffusion-based video inpainting and object removal methods can remove the objects but often struggle to erase these effects and to synthesize coherent backgrounds. Beyond method limitations, progress is further hampered by the lack of a comprehensive dataset that systematically captures common object effects across varied environments for training and evaluation. To address this, we introduce VOR (Video Object Removal), a large-scale dataset that provides diverse paired videos, each consisting of one video where the target object is present with its effects and a counterpart where the object and effects are absent, with corresponding object masks. VOR contains 60K high-quality video pairs from captured and synthetic sources, covers five effects types, and spans a wide range of object categories as well as complex, dynamic multi-object scenes. Building on VOR, we propose EffectErase, an effect-aware video object removal method that treats video object insertion as the inverse auxiliary task within a reciprocal learning scheme. The model includes task-aware region guidance that focuses learning on affected areas and enables flexible task switching. Then, an insertion-removal consistency objective that encourages complementary behaviors and shared localization of effect regions and structural cues. Trained on VOR, EffectErase achieves superior performance in extensive experiments, delivering high-quality video object effect erasing across diverse scenarios.

Existing video object removal methods predominantly rely on diffusion models following a noise-to-data paradigm, where generation starts from uninformative Gaussian noise. This approach discards the rich structural and contextual priors present in the original input video. Consequently, such methods often lack sufficient guidance, leading to incomplete object erasure or the synthesis of implausible content that conflicts with the scene's physical logic. In this paper, we reformulate video object removal as a video-to-video translation task via a stochastic bridge model. Unlike noise-initialized methods, our framework establishes a direct stochastic path from the source video (with objects) to the target video (objects removed). This bridge formulation effectively leverages the input video as a strong structural prior, guiding the model to perform precise removal while ensuring that the filled regions are logically consistent with the surrounding environment. To address the trade-off where strong bridge priors hinder the removal of large objects, we propose a novel adaptive mask modulation strategy. This mechanism dynamically modulates input embeddings based on mask characteristics, balancing background fidelity with generative flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and temporal consistency. The project page is https://bridgeremoval.github.io/.