Organizations: 1Tsinghua University · 2Harbin Institute of Technology · 3Pengcheng Laboratory
Abstract
Human image animation aims to generate a video from a static reference image, guided by pose information extracted from a driving video. Existing approaches often rely on pose estimators to extract intermediate representations, but such signals are prone to errors under occlusion or complex poses. Building on these observations, we present DirectAnimator, a framework that bypasses pose extraction and directly learns from raw driving videos. We introduce a Driving Cue Triplet consisting of pose, face, and location cues that captures motion, expression, and alignment in a semantically rich yet stable form, and we fuse them through a CueFusion DiT block for reliable control during denoising. To make learning dependable when the driving and reference identities differ, we devise a Same2X training strategy that aligns cross-ID features with those learned from same-ID data, regularizing optimization and accelerating convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectAnimator attains state-of-the-art visual quality and identity preservation while remaining robust to occlusions and complex articulation, and it does so with fewer computational resources. Our project page is at https://directanimator.github.io/.
Character image animation remains a foundational yet challenging task in computer vision. Existing approaches can be broadly categorized into three paradigms: methods based on explicit motion representations suffer from extraction errors and identity drift; methods based on implicit motion features lose fine-grained dynamics through compression; and in-context learning approaches avoid intermediate representations but incur prohibitive computational costs. Furthermore, all current systems are designed for offline synthesis, unable to meet the real-time requirements of interactive applications such as digital avatars and live-streaming hosts. To address these limitations, we present Wan-Animate-2, an end-to-end character animation framework that directly consumes the driving video within a redesigned Diffusion Transformer. Our architecture achieves superior motion fidelity and identity preservation by eliminating intermediate motion extractors entirely. We further introduce text driven viewpoint control that decouples the output camera perspective from the driving video--a capability rarely supported by prior character animation methods that rely on explicit motion representations. Beyond generation quality, we present Wan-Animate-2-Lite, an efficient variant that reduces inference latency to real-time thresholds through a three-stage training paradigm: teacher forcing pretraining with error buffer mechanism, and Self-Forcing distillation with chunk-wise backpropagation. This enables streaming character animation for interactive applications, opening new deployment scenarios that were previously infeasible. Qualitative evaluations and user studies demonstrate that Wan-Animate-2 achieves high-fidelity animation results across diverse characters and motion patterns. To foster further research and community development, we will release the Wan-Animate-2-Base model weights to the public.
Human Image Animation has seen significant advancements, primarily driven by diffusion models. However, existing methods typically demand substantial training data and resources to achieve high-quality results, limiting generalization and accessibility. In this work, we introduce \emph{FreeAnimate}, a training-free framework that leverages the inherent capabilities of image diffusion models to enable temporal consistency, identity preservation, and background stability. Our approach incorporates a novel preview generation strategy that provides temporal and structural priors from generated preview frames, effectively guiding pose alignment and background consistency without training. Additionally, FreeAnimate introduces Inversion-Boosted Attention and Reference-Anchored Self-Attention modules to guarantee temporal consistency and identity preservation. Experimental results demonstrate that FreeAnimate outperforms existing training-free competitors and training-based baseline methods, achieving generation quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods and offering robust generalization across diverse datasets. Our project page is at https://freeani.github.io/.
Creating photorealistic, animatable 3D human avatars from monocular images still largely depends on Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) and parametric body models, which constrain expressivity and often introduce artifacts due to imperfect fitting. We propose LUNA, an LBS-free universal neural animation model that directly maps multiple 2D controls like images, keypoints, sketches, and unseen characters into 3D Gaussian deformations, bypassing explicit body fitting. At its core, a transformer-based motion regressor disentangles global rigid motion from fine-grained local dynamics to capture both coherent movement and subtle non-rigid effects. To resolve the inherent ambiguity of 2D-to-3D lifting while scaling beyond fitted datasets, we introduce hybrid supervision that distills soft structural priors from an LBS teacher and a loss that supports training on both limited fitted data and large in-the-wild unlabeled videos. Extensive experiments show LUNA achieves competitive visual fidelity compared to LBS-based approaches, while delivering realistic human motion and zero-shot cross-identity generalization across diverse driving modalities. To the best of our knowledge, LUNA is the first end-to-end 3D animatable model that supports implicit 2D driving.