Cross-identity character animation aims to drive a target identity from a reference image to follow the motion of a source character from a driving video. The core challenge lies in the inherent entanglement of two capabilities: cross-identity spatial mapping (aligning position, scale, and skeletal proportions) and motion control (refining joint articulation, volumetric consistency, and view coherence). We introduce Reference-Aware Structural Alignment (RASA), a framework that disentangles spatial mapping from motion control by injecting structured priors into a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Our approach has two stages. First, a Spatial Prior Calibrator (SPC) fuses reference identity with driving pose to generate a spatially grounded initial noise latent, ensuring correct positioning, scaling, and alignment with the driving skeleton. Second, an Inherent Motional Guider (IMG) encodes shape-agnostic SMPL articulation parameters into a semantic motion vector beyond appearance-biased 2D keypoints. Injected into intermediate DiT layers, this vector complements the base pose condition for anatomically consistent articulation and view-aware volumetric refinement. We curate CIM-Bench, a high-quality benchmark with rigorous curation, for evaluation. Extensive experiments show RASA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in motion fidelity and visual quality. Our work establishes a new paradigm showing disentangled spatial and motional priors are key to robust character animation. Project page: https://hidream.ai.github.io/RASA/
Figures & tables
Figure 1: RASA enables high-fidelity character animation under diverse and structurally misaligned driving poses, including large motion variations, stylized identities, and multi-character animation.
Figure 2: The overview of RASA. Given a reference image and its extracted pose, a driving video and its corresponding pose sequence, as well as SMPL-based motion parameters, we first simulate structural misalignment by applying pose transformations to the driving poses. The motion parameters of the first frame are replicated three times to align temporally with the video latents. Through the Spatial Prior Calibrator module and the Inherent Motional Guider module, motion information is accurately transferred to the reference image while preserving structural consistency.
Figure 3: Illustration of CIM-Bench. Different identities perform the same motion sequence, creating authentic cross-identity structural discrepancies.
Method
Image Metrics
Video Metrics
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
FVD ↓
FID-VID ↓
DreamPose [ 24 ]
12.82
0.511
0.442
72.62
551.02
78.77
MagicAnimate [ 46 ]
-
0.714
0.239
32.09
179.07
21.75
Champ [ 57 ]
-
0.802
0.234
-
160.82
21.07
DisCo [ 42 ]
16.55
0.668
0.292
30.75
292.80
59.90
Animate Anyone [ 21 ]
17.40
0.734
0.287
60.70
453.00
60.00
Table 1: Quantitative results on the TikTok [ 22 ] dataset.
Method
Image Metrics
Video Metrics
Identity Metrics
Efficiency
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
FVD ↓
FID-VID ↓
Sim-Arc ↑
Face-FID ↓
Latency (s)
VRAM (MiB)
Animate-X [ 37 ]
14.05
0.426
0.474
105.14
1312.60
75.47
0.51
146.55
109
14,263
MTVCrafter [ 9 ]
14.19
0.431
0.457
85.21
1723.89
85.21
0.54
154.77
170
20,680
Wan-Animate [ 7 ]
11.29
0.372
0.585
178.58
1920.88
137.05
0.35
225.29
327
42,291
One-to-All-1.3B [ 31 ]
13.75
0.383
0.471
96.70
1324.74
76.79
0.51
163.99
91
21,880
Ours
15.93
0.472
0.372
60.96
667.96
17.63
0.72
90.63
61
11,951
Table 2: Quantitative results on the CIM-Bench.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison for cross-identity character animation task under structurally misaligned scenarios.
SMS
FCA
IMG
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
FVD ↓
FID-VID ↓
✓
18.90/14.60
0.799/0.453
0.209/0.393
23.04/80.96
316.45/737.48
10.77/30.93
✓
15.47/13.89
0.707/0.416
0.356/0.445
41.57/91.17
1567.03/1625.69
15.90/37.46
✓
✓
18.51/14.14
0.811/0.470
0.238/0.399
28.83/77.34
487.66/706.22
22.06/34.51
✓
✓
20.86/15.26
0.820/0.471
0.202/0.391
22.01/71.16
289.16/686.79
6.56/27.05
✓
✓
✓
22.03/15.93
0.830/0.472
0.189/0.372
18.93/60.96
190.82/667.96
3.32/17.63
Table 3: Ablation study on each key component of our model on TikTok [ 22 ] /CIM-Bench. SMS denotes performing random spatially transformation on driving poses. FCA denotes performing frame-wise cross attention on reference and driving pose. IMG denotes performing inherent motional guider.
Figure 5: Qualitative results of ablation study.
Figure 6: Ablation study of the FCA attention design in SPC module. Using the driving latent as the query preserves motion transfer, while the reference-query variant weakens motion dynamics.
Figure 7: Representative results under extreme proportions and non-humanoid topologies. The green boxes indicate successful cases under extreme body proportions, while the red boxes highlight failure cases involving non-humanoid topologies.
Controllable character animation has advanced rapidly in recent years, yet multi-character animation remains underexplored. As the number of characters grows, multi-character reference encoding becomes more susceptible to latent identity entanglement, resulting in identity bleeding and reduced controllability. Moreover, learning precise and spatio-temporally consistent correspondences between reference identities and driving pose sequences becomes increasingly challenging, often leading to identity-pose mis-binding and inconsistency in generated videos. To address these challenges, we propose AnyCrowd, a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based video generation framework capable of scaling to an arbitrary number of characters. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-Isolated Latent Representation (IILR), which encodes character instances independently prior to DiT processing to prevent latent identity entanglement. Building on this disentangled representation, we further propose Tri-Stage Decoupled Attention (TSDA) to bind identities to driving poses by decomposing self-attention into: (i) instance-aware foreground attention, (ii) background-centric interaction, and (iii) global foreground-background coordination. Furthermore, to mitigate token ambiguity in overlapping regions, an Adaptive Gated Fusion (AGF) module is integrated within TSDA to predict identity-aware weights, effectively fusing competing token groups into identity-consistent representations...
Zhenyu Xie, Ji Xia, Michael Kampffmeyer +9
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE · University of Tromsø (UiT) – The Arctic University of Norway, Norway · Shenzhen campus of Sun Yet-sen University, China
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.
Character animation aims to generate lifelike videos by transferring motion dynamics from a driving video to a reference image. Recent strides in generative models have paved the way for high-fidelity character animation. In this work, we present Kling-MotionControl, a unified DiT-based framework engineered specifically for robust, precise, and expressive holistic character animation. Leveraging a divide-and-conquer strategy within a cohesive system, the model orchestrates heterogeneous motion representations tailored to the distinct characteristics of body, face, and hands, effectively reconciling large-scale structural stability with fine-grained articulatory expressiveness. To ensure robust cross-identity generalization, we incorporate adaptive identity-agnostic learning, facilitating natural motion retargeting for diverse characters ranging from realistic humans to stylized cartoons. Simultaneously, we guarantee faithful appearance preservation through meticulous identity injection and fusion designs, further supported by a subject library mechanism that leverages comprehensive reference contexts. To ensure practical utility, we implement an advanced acceleration framework utilizing multi-stage distillation, boosting inference speed by over 10x. Kling-MotionControl distinguishes itself through intelligent semantic motion understanding and precise text responsiveness, allowing for flexible control beyond visual inputs. Human preference evaluations demonstrate that Kling-MotionControl delivers superior performance compared to leading commercial and open-source solutions, achieving exceptional fidelity in holistic motion control, open domain generalization, and visual quality and coherence. These results establish Kling-MotionControl as a robust solution for high-quality, controllable, and lifelike character animation.