We present Search2Motion, a training-free framework for object-level motion editing in image-to-video generation. Unlike prior methods requiring trajectories, bounding boxes, masks, or motion fields, Search2Motion adopts target-frame-based control, leveraging first-last-frame motion priors to realize object relocation while preserving scene stability without fine-tuning. Reliable target-frame construction is achieved through semantic-guided object insertion and robust background inpainting. We further show that early-step self-attention maps predict object and camera dynamics, offering interpretable user feedback and motivating ACE-Seed (Attention Consensus for Early-step Seed selection), a lightweight search strategy that improves motion fidelity without look-ahead sampling or external evaluators. Noting that existing benchmarks conflate object and camera motion, we introduce S2M-DAVIS and S2M-OMB for stable-camera, object-only evaluation, alongside FLF2V-obj metrics that isolate object artifacts without requiring ground-truth trajectories. Search2Motion consistently outperforms baselines on FLF2V-obj and VBench.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Left: Search2Motion is a training-free pipeline for object-level motion editing. Given a single image and a user-specified target location, Search2Motion constructs a target frame and leverages pretrained FLF2V motion priors to synthesize realistic object motion, without retraining or auxiliary control signals. Right: Sample pairs from the Search2Motion Benchmark, two stable-camera datasets for object-only motion evaluation.
Figure 2: The Search2Motion Pipeline is constructed with three components, where the user can interact with the application at the target frame construction stage (Background Inpainting and Object Placement). Then the original input image and the user-edited last frame are sent to a first-frame last-frame (FLF2V) video generator to generate the final video based on the given input image and user preference, while utilizing ACE-Seed , a novel search criterion in the noise space based on attention-consensus, to improve the generated video quality automatically.
Figure 3Figure 4Table 5
Dataset
Method
ObjMC ↓
CA-IoU ↑
S2M-OMB
DragAnything [ 30 ]
58.12
0.5619
TTM - Wan2.2-5B [ 25 ]
175.02
0.4460
Search2Motion - Wan2.2-5B
9.96
0.8818
S2M-DAVIS
DragAnything [ 30 ]
36.61
0.4290
TTM - Wan2.2-5B [ 25 ]
105.79
0.3686
Search2Motion - Wan2.2-5B
3.72
0.8211
Table 3: Object center distance (ObjMC) and center-aligned object mask IoU (CA-IoU) between the penultimate frame in the generated video and the given target frame.
Figure 7: Qualitative results of Search2Motion video generation comparing against DragAnything and TTM on S2M-OMB (top two) and S2M-DAVIS (bottom).
Figure 8
Dataset
Seed Selection
Subject ↑
Background ↑
Temporal ↑
Motion ↑
DINOv2 ↑
DINOv2 ↑
LPIPS ↓
LPIPS ↓
Consistency
Consistency
Flickering
Smoothness
first frame
first frame
S2M-OMB
none †
95.14
95.88
98.68
99.30
96.99
82.60
.0435
.2207
BANSA [ 11 ]
94.81
95.49
98.36
99.25
97.03
83.02
.0446
.2177
ACE-Seed
95.19
96.07
99.00
99.45
97.09
84.31
.0419
.2075
S2M-DAVIS
none †
96.45
96.52
99.30
99.57
95.70
78.31
.0637
.2739
BANSA [ 11 ]
95.85
96.10
98.85
99.45
95.87
77.87
.0568
.2684
Table 4: Seed selection ablation on VBench and FLF2V-obj metrics using Wan2.2-5B. † denotes the average performance of non-selected seeds.
Ranking
R @ top-5
R @ bottom-5
ACE-Seed
62.50
54.16
VBench
63.88*
61.11*
FLF2V-obj
70.83 *
78.12 *
Table 5: Recall scores using human ranking as relevant items from S2M-DAVIS. FLF2V-obj aligns best to human preference, highlighting its value as a set of new metrics. * denotes average recall over respective set of metrics.
Appendix figures & tables15 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 10: Comparison of our Search2Motion using LaMa [ 26 ] inpainting versus Generative Omnimatte [ 13 ] . With LaMa, last-frame’s inpainting artifacts persist throughout the generated sequence, whereas our earlier method utilizing Generative Omnimatte produces cleaner backgrounds and yields overall higher video quality.
Figure 11: Qualitative comparison of image object removal and background inpainting. The top row displays the source, mask, and target of sample real_001 from the ObjectMover set A. The bottom row, from left to right, displays images generated by ObjectClear, RORem, and our inpainting methods. ObjectClear and our methods can remove shadows, whereas RORem does not.
Training
Method
Free
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
FID ↓
LPIPS ↓
fMSE ↓
Search2MotionGenOmni
✓
21.37
0.69
30.90
0.13
1160.80
Search2MotionROSE
✓
21.67
0.68
27.93
0.11
1148.89
RORem [ 14 ]
-
26.70
0.83
29.91
0.08
1181.25
ObjectClear [ 37 ]
-
31.58
0.93
15.01
0.03
600.51
Appendix
Table 6: Image object removal and background inpainting with 512×512 resolution. We evaluate these methods on the ObjectMover [ 34 ] dataset. More specifically, the ObjMove-A set, which contains 200 (source, mask, target) samples.
Figure 12: Synthetic data generation for S2M-DAVIS through the semantic-guided object placement pipeline.
Figure 13: Qualitative results of Search2Motion video generation comparing against DragAnything and TTM on S2M-OMB (top two) and S2M-DAVIS (bottom).
Figure 14: Object end state evaluation (green: ground truth; red: prediction).
Dataset
Seed Selection
Subject ↑
Background ↑
Temporal ↑
Motion ↑
DINOv2 ↑
DINOv2 ↑
LPIPS ↓
LPIPS ↓
Consistency
Consistency
Flickering
Smoothness
first frame
first frame
S2M-OMB
none †
94.07
95.51
97.53
98.53
96.26
82.28
.0592
.2229
ACE-Seed
94.77
95.98
97.99
98.75
96.92
84.46
.0498
.1965
S2M-DAVIS
none †
94.39
95.14
97.91
98.69
93.93
76.39
.0904
.2849
ACE-Seed
95.69
95.89
98.53
99.00
95.19
81.16
.0809
.2644
Appendix
Table 7: Seed selection ablation on VBench and FLF2V-obj metrics using VACE-1.3B. † denotes the average performance of non-selected seeds.
Figure 15: Additional qualitative Best-Worst comparison ranked by ACE-Seed algorithm from the S2M-DAVIS dataset.
Figure 16: Additional qualitative Best-Worst comparison ranked by ACE-Seed algorithm from the S2M-OMB dataset.
Figure 17: VBench ablation for ACE-Seed with different numbers of noise seeds. Higher is better.
Figure 18: FLF2V-obj ablation for ACE-Seed with different numbers of noise seeds.
Step
Subject ↑
Background ↑
Temporal ↑
Motion ↑
DINOv2 ↑
DINOv2 ↑
LPIPS ↓
LPIPS ↓
Consistency
Consistency
Flickering
Smoothness
First Frame
First Frame
1
95.44
95.52
98.39
98.94
94.76
78.02
0.0834
0.2831
4
95.35
95.47
98.43
98.94
95.06
79.11
0.0787
0.2705
7
95.53
95.82
98.49
98.98
94.93
80.48
0.0824
0.2723
10
95.69
95.89
98.53
99.00
95.19
81.16
0.0809
0.2644
Appendix
Table 8: VBench and FLF2V-obj ablation results on S2M-DAVIS for attention maps of different diffusion steps used in ACE-Seed . All experiments share the same set of noise seeds. Best , Second Best .
Figure 19: Early-stage self-attention visualization under different token-masking strategies from S2M-DAVIS dataset. For each sample, from top to bottom: attention computed with the foreground (fg) object mask , inverse foreground mask (bg) , placement mask (pl) . It shows that bg can provide the most rich information (comparing to fg) with a relatively more consistent area coverage among different samples (comparing to pl).
Figure 20: Attention overlays on the final generated video across sampled denoising steps (ranges from 1 to 50). The attention maps begin to resemble the final object layout very early in the diffusion process, with the strongest structural alignment emerging around step 10.
Figure 21: Self-attention overlays on the final video across attention blocks 0 to 29, shown for denoising step 1 (top) and step 10 (bottom). For both steps, blocks 22-26 produce the cleanest and most spatially coherent attention maps relative to other layers, given the first-frame foreground-mask tokens. Compared with step 1, the attention maps at step 10 exhibit noticeably clearer object contours that align better with the final video layout.
Current motion-controlled image-to-video generation models rigidly follow user-provided trajectories that are often sparse, imprecise, and causally incomplete. Such reliance often yields unnatural or implausible outcomes, especially by missing secondary causal consequences. To address this, we introduce MotiMotion, a novel framework that reformulates motion control as a reasoning-then-generation problem. To encourage causally grounded and commonsense-consistent interactions, we leverage a training-free vision-language reasoner to refine image-space coordinates of primary trajectories and to hallucinate plausible secondary motions. To further improve motion naturalness, we propose a confidence-aware control scheme that modulates guidance strength, enabling the model to closely follow high-confidence plans while correcting artifacts under low-confidence inputs with its internal generative priors. To support systematic evaluation, we curate a new image-to-video benchmark, MotiBench, consisting of interaction-centric scenes where new events are triggered by motion. Both VLM-based evaluation and a human study on MotiBench demonstrate that MotiMotion produces videos with more plausible object behaviors and interaction, and is preferred over existing approaches.
Video motion transfer aims to generate a target video that inherits motion patterns from a source video while rendering new scenes. Existing training-free approaches focus on constructing motion guidance based on the intermediate outputs of pre-trained T2V models, which results in heavy computational overhead and limited flexibility. In this paper, we present FlowMotion, a novel training-free framework that enables efficient and flexible motion transfer by directly leveraging the predicted outputs of flow-based T2V models. Our key insight is that early latent predictions inherently encode rich temporal information. Motivated by this, we propose flow guidance, which extracts motion representations based on latent predictions to align motion patterns between source and generated videos. We further introduce a velocity regularization strategy to stabilize optimization and ensure smooth motion evolution. By operating purely on model predictions, FlowMotion achieves superior time and resource efficiency as well as competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Zhen Wang, Youcan Xu, Jun Xiao +1
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · State key lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University
We study object motion path editing in videos, where the goal is to alter a target object's trajectory while preserving the original scene content. Unlike prior video editing methods that primarily manipulate appearance or rely on point-track-based trajectory control, which is often challenging for users to provide during inference, especially in videos with camera motion, we offer a practical, easy-to-use approach to controllable object-centric motion editing. We present Trace, a framework that enables users to design the desired trajectory in a single anchor frame and then synthesizes a temporally consistent edited video. Our approach addresses this task with a two-stage pipeline: a cross-view motion transformation module that maps first-frame path design to frame-aligned box trajectories under camera motion, and a motion-conditioned video re-synthesis module that follows these trajectories to regenerate the object while preserving the remaining content of the input video. Experiments on diverse real-world videos show that our method produces more coherent, realistic, and controllable motion edits than recent image-to-video and video-to-video methods.
Quynh Phung, Long Mai, Cusuh Ham +3
University of Maryland, College Park · Adobe Research