Controllable Video Generation

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Overview

The field studies how to make generated videos follow user intent, from preserving a subject or style to specifying poses, object trajectories, camera moves, events, and physical properties. Common approaches condition diffusion models with text, images, tracks, masks, or 3D geometry, adapt pretrained models with ControlNet or LoRA modules, or steer sampling at inference; newer world models add explicit state, planning, and memory for interactive, long-horizon generation. Evaluation spans prompt and control adherence, identity and scene consistency, motion accuracy, physical plausibility, and video quality, including tests on driving, human-object interaction, and cinematic scenes. A central tension remains: stronger or denser controls can improve precision but may reduce naturalness or visual quality, while long rollouts can drift or fail to realize intended state changes even when individual frames look convincing.

Latest papers

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321 papers52 papers in the last four weeks, up 148% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Aug 6, 2026

UniVVT: A Unified End-to-End Framework for High-Fidelity Video Virtual Try-on

Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) synthesizes a video of a person wearing a target garment while preserving identity, motion, and scene dynamics. Dominant approaches cast VVT as mask-conditioned video inpainting and rely on separate modules for human parsing, pose estimation, and garment warping. This multi-stage design complicates deployment and, more critically, allows errors in explicit geometric priors to propagate irreversibly into the generated video. We present UniVVT, a unified end-to-end framework that reframes VVT as semantically conditioned video generation, eliminating mask, pose, and warping modules at inference. At its core, a scene-task perceiver built on a Multimodal Large Language Model jointly encodes the source video, target garment, and task instruction into compact, task-aware latent tokens, implicitly capturing what to transfer and where and how to transfer it. A lightweight semantic bridge then aligns these tokens with the conditioning space of a diffusion-based video generator, enabling coherent garment transfer. To robustly couple the heterogeneous components, we devise a three-stage progressive training strategy comprising semantic alignment, joint task adaptation, and flexible-resolution refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniVVT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, validating implicit semantic guidance as a simple and effective alternative to fragile geometric preprocessing for end-to-end virtual try-on.

Yushe Cao, Shikun Feng, Fei Shen +5

Tsinghua University · Zhongguancun Academy · National University of Singapore +2

Virtual Try-OnIdentity-Preserving Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Aug 5, 2026

HelloWorld: Enabling Socially Interactive Characters in Video World Models

Despite the remarkable recent progress of video world models, social interaction between users and the characters within these worlds remains unsupported. To fill this gap, we present HelloWorld, a video world model that enables social interaction with in-world characters. With a single button press, users can prompt the on-screen character to respond toward the camera, e.g., turning to the viewer, waving, nodding, or speaking a short greeting. To make these interactions natural, we propose a self-distillation pipeline that finetunes the video generation model on data synthesized by itself. Each synthesized clip contains both social interactions and camera motion, allowing the model to learn camera-pose conditioning without degrading interaction quality. At inference, we further introduce a training-free module that determines when the interaction occurs. Upon a button press, it modulates the cross-attention masks of the DiT so that the interaction-related text prompt attends only to the frames within the press window, temporally localizing the character's response. We further build HelloWorldBench, a 400-sample benchmark with three social interaction metrics alongside three conventional metrics, for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that HelloWorld surpasses a variety of baselines in interaction quality, while maintaining state-of-the-art picture aesthetics and camera-pose following. Project page: https://github.com/AlayaLab/HelloWorld

Liangyang Ouyang, Ruicong Liu, Xuangeng Chu +2

1The University of Tokyo · 2Alaya Lab

Camera-Conditioned Video GenerationVideo GenerationControllable Video GenerationVideo World Models
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Aug 5, 2026

ContextMaster: Interactive Multi-Shot Video Creation via Fixed-Budget Sparse Context Routing

Recent video models increasingly support generation, reference conditioning, and editing within a single model, yet typically expose them as separate operations over fixed inputs. Practical creation unfolds across multiple shots, requiring one model to generate from text, follow a reference, or edit source footage while maintaining shared history. We formalize this setting as interactive multi-shot video creation (IMVC) and introduce ContextMaster, a unified model with a role-aware context representation for these operations. An interactive model must retain access to an expanding history without allowing the context read cost at each denoising step to grow. ContextMaster combines reusable clean context states with fixed budget sparse context routing and uses ConstraintSink to keep task constraints visible. To address the dual challenges of sparse context access and inference with few denoising steps, we propose a two-stage privileged context distillation framework, which transfers full context behavior from a dense teacher through consistency distillation and then refines deployment rollouts with distribution matching. Experiments on the three primitive tasks demonstrate improved task fulfillment and consistency across shots over specialized baselines. User studies further validate flexibly composed workflows, while the model reaches 16 FPS on a single GPU.

Xu Guo, Zhengxuan Wei, Xinghui Li +11

1Tsinghua University · 2Nanjing University · 3Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology +2

Video Diffusion ModelsMulti-Shot Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Aug 3, 2026

WorldExam: Benchmarking World Models from Apparent Appearance to Inherent Reactivity

Controllable video generation models are increasingly being developed as world models. Accordingly, evaluating them in this role extends beyond the apparent appearance of generated videos to the inherent reactivity of the worlds they depict: the ability to infer from the scene state how the world should react and to generate plausible consequences not explicitly described in the input. Yet existing benchmarks mainly assess visual quality or explicit instruction fulfillment by checking whether requested actions and interaction outcomes are realized, leaving inherent reactivity underexamined. We introduce WorldExam, a hierarchical diagnostic benchmark spanning four levels: Visual Quality, Control Adherence, Spatial Consistency, and World Reactivity. It comprises 1,474 cases across eight dedicated tasks and supports unified evaluation of camera-, action-, and language-driven model paradigms. The World Reactivity level evaluates scene-conditioned reactions and goal-directed behaviors beyond what is explicitly specified in the input. Evaluation of 20 representative models reveals a clear capability split. Camera-driven models excel at camera control, but their interfaces do not support dynamic interaction; action-driven models control subjects more precisely but often leave the world unresponsive; and language-driven models perform better on interaction but follow complex controls less faithfully. No model combines broad task coverage with consistently strong performance, showing that high visual quality and explicit instruction fulfillment do not guarantee inherent reactivity.

Yuxue Yang, Shuyao Shang, Jiahe Wang +13

1CASIA · 4AMAP · 5THU +2

Controllable Video GenerationWorld Model EvaluationInteractive World ModelsVideo Generation Evaluation
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Aug 3, 2026

UniMoCa: Unifying Motion and Camera Controls as Visual Proxies for Faithful Human Video Generation

Controlling human motion and camera movement is essential for faithful human-oriented video generation, yet remains challenging in multi-person scenes with large body motions, occlusions, and dynamic cameras. Existing pipelines typically rely on visual motion sequences, such as skeleton maps, pose maps, or rendered body representations, for motion control, while using camera embeddings for camera control. Such heterogeneous control interfaces force video generation models to reconcile pixel-aligned visual cues with non-visual geometric embeddings, making motion-camera attribution difficult and sensitive to camera estimation errors. We propose UniMoCa, a representation-driven framework that unifies motion and camera controls in visual space. At the core of UniMoCa is Motion-Camera Visual Proxy (MCVP), a mutually-sharable novel representation that converts 3D human motion and camera trajectories extracted from driving videos into an identity-neutral visual proxy. MCVP renders temporally aligned human geometry under the recovered camera trajectory and augments it with explicit camera trajectory markers, replacing heterogeneous visual-parametric controls with distinguishable visual cues. As both control factors are represented in the same visual space, they become mutually compatible rather than heterogeneous, enabling consistent joint reasoning and editing during video generation. We further curate a MCVP-Video dataset covering complex actions, multi-person interactions, and diverse camera trajectories. Experiments based on the Wan2.2 I2V show that UniMoCa achieves substantial gains in human motion control, camera control, temporal consistency, and camera-aware robustness with minimal additional complexity. More details are shown in our Project page: https://tanliming-daniel.github.io/UniMoCa/.

Liming Tan, Ye Chen, Hao Zhang +3

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Monash University · USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry

Camera-Controlled Video GenerationPose-Conditioned Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Aug 3, 2026

LiveLight: Real-time Streaming Video Relighting with Interactive Control

We present LiveLight, the first diffusion-based framework for real-time streaming video relighting with interactive 3D lighting control. Achieving this is non-trivial, as it requires overcoming three critical challenges: effectively injecting dynamic 3D lighting into a diffusion model, maintaining high-fidelity generation under an extremely low NFE (Number of Function Evaluations) budget for real-time speed, and facilitating continuous streaming for interactive control. To address these pain points, we propose three key designs. First, for accurate lighting injection, we propose a lightweight adapter that feeds Multi-Plane Light Irradiance (MPLI) conditions-depth-aware irradiance maps encoding 3D lighting geometry-directly into the diffusion backbone. Second, to prevent rendering quality degradation at low NFEs towards real-time distillation, we introduce a geometry-guided feedback branch. This training-time constraint leverages a frozen geometry estimator to enforce depth- and normal-consistent relighting, ensuring geometrically plausible shading without adding inference overhead. Finally, to enable streaming interaction, we develop a progressive rolling-window strategy that maintains a denoising ladder of latent chunks at varying noise levels. By propagating intermediate states, this strategy guarantees temporal coherence and supports arbitrarily long video relighting with per-frame reference refresh. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that LiveLight achieves state-of-the-art relighting quality while running at real-time speed, significantly outperforming offline baselines in temporal stability, lighting controllability, and user preference. To foster real-time interactive relighting research, we will publicly release our models, training data, and synthetic data generator.

Yue Ma, Jiangming Wang, Yucheng Wang +8

1HKUST · University of Macau · 3THU +2

Video EditingControllable Video GenerationVideo RelightingTemporal Consistency in Video GenerationDiffusion Models3D Scene Relighting
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Aug 1, 2026

Geometry-guided Emotion Modulation for Controllable and Photorealistic Emotional Talking Face Generation

Audio-driven emotional talking face generation aims to synthesize realistic videos with expressive facial dynamics. However, existing methods struggle to balance controllability and visual fidelity. Although implicit representations capture rich semantics, they lack structural guidance, often resulting in averaged emotional expressions. In contrast, explicit geometric methods offer better control over facial expressions but tend to sacrifice high-frequency texture details. To address it, we propose GemTalk, a diffusion-based framework that combines the semantic richness of implicit representations with the structural precision of explicit geometric priors. We introduce a Vision-guided Audio Emotion Projection (V-AEP) module to extract implicit emotional lip and expression features. At the same time, a Diffusion-based Geometric Priors Generator (D-GPG) generates identity-aware blendshape coefficients as explicit structural priors. Crucially, our Geometry-guided Emotion Modulation (GEM) module leverages these geometric priors to recalibrate the magnitude of implicit features, enabling precise, continuous control over emotional expressions, especially emotion intensity, without sacrificing visual quality. Extensive experiments show GemTalk achieves superior performance in photo-realism, and facial emotional dynamics.

Chenggong Hu, Shaoyin Ma, Yi Wang +3

School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University Ningbo, China

Audio-Driven Facial AnimationVideo GenerationControllable Video GenerationDiffusion Models
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Aug 1, 2026

Diagnosing Under-Development of Irreversible Processes in Video Generation

Many physical attributes are irreversible: ice melts but does not re-freeze, paper chars but does not un-burn. Do video generators respect this? We show the question is hard to measure, and that what can be measured reliably is development rather than reversal. Metrics of local reversal are null-degenerate: a per-clip violation rate scores 0.500.50 on pure noise, and a variance-normalized reversal residual sits at its noise ceiling. What survives null-testing is a two-part protocol: progress (a directional attribute correlation) and a stasis rate. Under this protocol, generated video separates cleanly from real footage, and the gap is human-validated. Across seven text-to-video models, real reference footage advances (ρ=+0.40ρ{=}{+}0.40, 35%35\% static) while every generator shows near-zero progress and 9292--100%100\% stasis; nine annotators rate real footage far above generated (2.752.75 vs.\ 0.990.99 on a 00--44 scale). The reliable finding is under-development: generators barely advance irreversible attributes rather than reversing them. As a complementary mechanism, we show that post-hoc readout guidance is gameable, whereas enforcing monotonicity by construction in a disentangled attribute latent removes the gameable readout, validated in controlled and semi-synthetic settings.

Jian Xu, Yanning Wu, Delu Zeng +2

Physical Consistency in Video GenerationT2V GenerationControllable Video GenerationVideo Generation Evaluation
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Jul 31, 2026

FlexComposer: Unified Video Compositing from Images to Dynamic Footage with Flexible Trajectory Control

Generative video compositing, which involves inserting external assets seamlessly into existing video sequences, is essential for content creation and visual effects. However, existing approaches suffer from a control-fidelity trade-off: they either hallucinate motion from static images, failing to preserve the dynamics of pre-animated assets, or lack fine-grained spatial control for precise asset placement along user-defined trajectories. We propose FlexComposer, a unified framework that standardizes video compositing as a trajectory-guided conditional generation task, enabling the seamless integration of both static images and dynamic footage. Our approach introduces three key designs: (1) a Unified Canonical Foreground Representation that decouples an object's intrinsic motion from its global displacement, standardizing heterogeneous inputs into a stabilized, centered latent space; (2) a Spatial-Aware Latent Injection strategy that exploits the translation equivariance of VAE latent spaces to transport canonical features onto target trajectories via a parameter-free mechanism; and (3) a Hybrid Dataset and Synthetic-to-Real Curriculum that synergizes procedural simulation, real-world cinematic footage, and generative data to implicitly learn physically plausible illumination and shadow harmonization. This unified design handles diverse inputs from product photos to dynamic subjects achieving high-fidelity motion control and environmental integration without the need for explicit 3D reconstruction or auxiliary learnable adapters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexComposer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, temporal consistency, and trajectory adherence.

Songchun Zhang, Sitong Guo, Xianghao Kong +4

HKUST · ZJU · CUHK +1

Video EditingControllable Video GenerationTemporal Consistency in Video GenerationTrajectory-Guided Video Generation
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Jul 30, 2026

TARS: Timestep-Aware Data Scaling for 3D-Free Video Re-Shooting

Video re-shooting aims to regenerate videos with controllable camera motion and viewpoint. Existing methods rely on explicit 3D priors, which are limited by reconstruction quality and often perform poorly when synthesizing previously unseen regions, or on paired videos with different camera trajectories, whose scarcity hinders generalization. We revisit video re-shooting through text-driven semantic viewpoint specification, enabling control over shot scale, viewing angle, and first-/third-person perspective. To this end, we propose TARS, a 3D-free video re-shooting paradigm. Timestep-wise sensitivity analysis reveals that camera motion is primarily established during high-noise stages, where coarse spatiotemporal structures are formed. Based on this insight, we introduce self-supervised training to learn camera dynamics and fundamental visual representations without paired re-shooting data or 3D reconstruction. Through data scaling and joint textual-camera conditioning, TARS supports robust camera and viewpoint control, plausibly synthesizing regions beyond the source view under large camera motions while enabling reverse-angle re-shooting and perspective switching. Extensive experiments show that TARS provides more accurate and temporally consistent camera control than prior methods. Project Page: https://ymlinfeng.github.io/TARS.github.io/

Jiwen Liu, Shujuan Li, Xiaohan Li +5

1Kling Team · 2Tsinghua University · 3Peking University

Camera-Controlled Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 29, 2026

VideoCoCo: Code-as-CoT for Physically-Consistent Video Generation via an Agentic Dual-Engine System

Text-to-video models have achieved remarkable visual quality, yet they still struggle to generate physically consistent dynamics because the temporal evolution of a scene must be inferred implicitly from a highly compressed text prompt. Existing chain-of-thought approaches introduce intermediate plans or visual states, but these representations are typically non-executable or temporally sparse, limiting their ability to instantiate and control the complete spatiotemporal process. To address this limitation, we introduce VideoCoCo, an agentic dual-engine framework in which executable Blender code serves as a process-level chain of thought. Given a text prompt, a coding agent synthesizes a Blender program that explicitly specifies the scene and its temporal evolution. The executable simulation engine runs the program to produce a deterministic spatiotemporal draft, which is subsequently transformed into a photorealistic video by a generative video engine through draft-conditioned editing. This decomposition separates process-level reasoning from high-fidelity visual realization. To adapt the video editor to simulated drafts, we construct VideoCoCo-3K, a curated dataset of draft-instruction-target triplets. VideoCoCo improves the OmniWeaving baseline from 0.475 to 0.558 on PhyGenBench and from 52.18 to 77.88 on VBench-2.0, achieving the best average score on both benchmarks. These results demonstrate that executable code provides an effective, controllable, and inspectable intermediate representation for physically consistent video generation.

Haodong Li, Tianfei Ren, Xiaoxiao Ma +25

1CUHK · 2USTC · 3SCUT +8

Physical Consistency in Video GenerationT2V GenerationAgentic Video GenerationVideo GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 29, 2026

From Passive Video to Editable Experience: Physically Grounded Experience Synthesis for Embodied Intelligence

The key bottleneck in embodied AI is not model architecture but data. Although billions of human manipulation videos exist online, robots cannot directly learn from them due to the embodiment gap between human morphology and robot hardware. We introduce Pegasus, a low-resource framework that bridges this gap by translating human demonstrations into robot-learnable data through structured knowledge transfer. Instead of relying on raw video prompts, Pegasus constructs a graph-based intermediate representation: a Task Graph extracted from human videos is transformed through Affordance and Constraint Graphs into a Robot Planning Graph for robot-conditioned video generation. A hierarchical affordance latent space models the relationship between object states, affordances, and tasks, enabling generalization beyond object identities. A closed-loop physics verifier further filters invalid generations using kinematic feasibility, collision constraints, and joint limits. We evaluate Pegasus across a range of egocentric manipulation benchmarks, including GTEA Gaze+ and EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and diverse robot embodiments, assessing Task Correctness, Executability, State Consistency, and Learnability. Results demonstrate reliable cross-embodiment translation and show that robot data generation can be reframed from a hardware collection problem into a scalable, low-resource knowledge transfer problem.

Jia Luo

Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsRobotic ManipulationAgent Skill LearningControllable Video GenerationCross-Embodiment Transfer
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Jul 29, 2026

Visko Orbis 1.0: A Live Model for Real-Time Interactive Long Video Generation

We present Visko Orbis 1.0, a Live Model for real-time, interactive long video generation. Users can change the prompt at any moment during generation, and the update becomes visible in real time. Visko Orbis 1.0 supports long-form text-to-video, image-to-video, and video continuation, with multilingual prompts and prompt switching while generation is in progress. A bounded multi-scale memory preserves subjects, scenes, and style across chunks, sustaining hour-scale rollouts without evident quality or color drift. The generator is factorized causally in time, matching the causal structure of physical dynamics, and is aligned with a latent world-model reward for predictive consistency. Built on a distilled chunk-wise streaming generator and a streaming video upscaler, Visko Orbis 1.0 delivers 4K video generation at 24 FPS in real time, using an optimized GPU serving engine. In quantitative evaluations, Visko Orbis 1.0 achieves the best DOVER aesthetic and technical scores and the best VideoAlign visual and motion quality, and leads three physical-plausibility protocols (VideoPhy-2, Physics-IQ, and VBench-2.0 Physics); in long-form Arena comparisons, it obtains the highest overall-preference and temporal-stability ratings among all the state-of-the-art real-time interactive video generation systems.

Xiangbo Gao, Siyuan Yang, Ping He +12

Controllable Video GenerationVideo GenerationPhysical Consistency in Video GenerationReal-Time Interactive Video GenerationLong-Horizon Video GenerationMemory-Augmented Video Generation+3
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Jul 29, 2026

CineWeaver: Training-Free Reference-Controllable Multi-Shot Long Video Generation for Cinematic Storytelling

Cinematic video generation is challenging for text-to-video diffusion models due to concurrent requirements on multi-shot generation, fine-grained controllability over characters and scenes, and long-form generation across extended temporal horizons. Existing methods rely on customization and retraining to separately address specific requirements, and cannot simultaneously fulfill all the requirements with a unified framework. In this paper, we shed light on the training-free paradigm with the key insight that the difficulty of multi-shot generation arises from a structural bias toward temporal continuity in pretrained video diffusion models, and consequently, propose a unified framework named CineWeaver to achieve reference-controllable multi-shot long-video generation without retraining. We manipulate positional encoding and attention patterns to break temporal continuity during inference to enable clear shot transitions using pretrained video diffusion models. Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework with a shot-routed reference conditioning mechanism for per-shot fine-grained controllability, and develop an anchor memory mechanism to allow long-form generation with consistent global appearance cues. To our best knowledge, CineWeaver is the first unified framework to simultaneously enable long-form, reference-controllable, and multi-shot video generation in a training-free fashion. Experimental results demonstrate that CineWeaver produces high-quality cinematic videos of long durations with consistent identities, stable global appearance, and clear shot transitions. The project page is available at: https://cineweaver.github.io.

Yuyang Huang, Yabo Chen, Wenrui Dai +6

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, China. · Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.

Video Diffusion ModelsLong Video GenerationMulti-Shot Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 25, 2026

HALLELUAI: A Hallucination-Aware AI System for Ultra-Realistic Image-to-Video Generation at Scale

AI-generated video is increasingly used across marketing, product storytelling, and creative workflows, yet automated; high-precision quality control remains a major constraint to scaling production. We present HALLELUAI, an end-to-end system that moderates and regenerates image-to-video outputs to meet expert-level creative standards and deliver ultra-realistic videos with consistent end-user quality of experience (QoE) at scale. The system integrates a video moderation module that evaluates frame-level aesthetics, temporal motion fidelity, and fine-grained hallucination risks relative to the source image, with an agentic regeneration module that iteratively fixes failures through prompt refinement, controlled camera adjustments, targeted model or image switching, and structured retry strategies. The moderation logic is aligned with domain-specific creative guidelines and produces granular, machine-actionable feedback that directly drives regeneration. In human-in-the-loop evaluations with creative experts, HALLELUAI shows strong alignment and reliably outputs ultra-realistic, production-grade videos suitable for product and marketing placements at scale. This framework advances trustworthy AI generated video content by enforcing visual realism, brand safety, and strict input-image fidelity while enabling image-to-video generation at scale.

Aniket Sakpal, Yang Jiang, Rouzbeh Davoudi +2

Expedia Group

Image-to-Video GenerationVideo Content ModerationHallucination MitigationControllable Video GenerationVideo Generation Evaluation
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Jul 24, 2026

AgentHOI: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Human-Object-Interaction Video Generation via Implicit Representation Alignment

Recent advances in video diffusion models have spurred interest in human-object interaction (HOI) video generation, which demands fine-grained control over interaction logic beyond single-subject animation. However, existing HOI methods rely heavily on explicit motion control, limiting scalability and generalization across diverse objects and interactions. In this study, we propose AgentHOI, a text-driven HOI video generation following a thinking-before-generation framework that bridges the gap between high-level textual intent and physical execution through multi-agent reasoning over perception, interaction, and motion planning. Building upon the generated interaction plans, we further strengthen text-driven motion understanding. We introduce an implicit text-motion alignment strategy that distills text-to-motion priors into the video diffusion model, enabling robust HOI synthesis without explicit motion inputs at inference. Experiments show that AgentHOI significantly improves interaction naturalness, object appearance preservation, and adherence to complex textual instructions across challenging object-centric scenarios such as wearing and riding. The code is available at https://github.com/bone-11/agenthoi.

Ziyao Huang, Shunkai Li, Juan Cao +7

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Tencent HunYuan

HOI GenerationVideo Diffusion ModelsText-to-Motion GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 23, 2026

GraphVid: Interactive Graph-Controllable Video Generation

Controllable video generation remains challenging due to the difficulty of specifying precise multi-object interactions using text prompts or motion-control inputs that primarily constrain pixel movement. In practice, trajectory-based control often requires users to draw accurate tracks for multiple objects, which scales poorly with scene complexity and becomes ambiguous under occlusion or overlap. To enable flexible yet precise multi-subject control, we introduce GraphVid\textbf{GraphVid}, a graph-conditioned image-to-video generation model that enables interactive control through structured interaction graphs. We further curate GraphVid-Bench\textbf{GraphVid-Bench}, a large-scale interaction-centric video dataset with structured relational annotations to enable training of interaction-aware video generation models. Despite using substantially less training data and fewer trainable parameters than prior motion-control methods, GraphVid delivers strong controllability and video quality. Compared with Motion-I2V, GraphVid reduces FID by up to 39.9% and FVD by 37.6%, while improving PSNR (9.87=>15.98) and SSIM (0.38=>0.61). Our results highlight the potential of structured semantic interfaces as a powerful paradigm for controllable video generation.

Vedant Shah, Onkar Susladkar, Tushar Prakash +5

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Sony Research India

Image-to-Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 22, 2026

Vera: Identity-Faithful Human Subject-to-Video Generation

Subject-to-video (S2V) generation has made substantial progress in preserving reference subjects across diverse categories, yet generic subject consistency remains insufficient for human-centric generation. A video may appear globally consistent while identity-critical human details still drift across frames, poses, and interactions. This issue becomes more severe in multi-person scenarios, where incorrect identity-role binding leads to subject confusion, attribute swapping, and excessive copying of reference-specific appearance cues. We propose Vera, a unified human-centric S2V framework for single- and multi-person generation. We first construct a million-pair identity-aligned human image-video dataset through person-level cross-clip retrieval, providing explicit identity correspondence and diverse references. Built on this dataset, Vera introduces two complementary designs. Identity-Focal Masked Supervision (IFMS) strengthens identity-aware learning with spatially focused supervision while reducing interference from irrelevant artifacts. Reference-Aware Layer-wise Attention (RALA) regulates how video tokens interact with reference identity cues in the DiT backbone, preserving stable identity anchors and enhancing layer-aware identity readout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Vera improves human identity consistency, multi-person subject binding, and motion naturalness, while reducing identity confusion and excessive reference-image copying.

Yulong Xu, Xinyue Liu, Shujuan Li +6

Kuaishou Technology · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Tsinghua University

Video Diffusion ModelsIdentity-Preserving Video GenerationVideo GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 22, 2026

SafeGen: Goal-Conditioned Video Diffusion of Safety-Critical Scenarios for VLM-Based Autonomous Driving

VLMs are increasingly deployed in AD systems, creating an urgent need for rigorous safety evaluation under rare yet safety-critical scenarios. Among these, interactions with vulnerable road users represent a major source of real-world failures. However, existing safety-critical scenario generation methods predominantly rely on simulator-based pipelines, which suffer from a substantial sim-to-real gap and often fail to capture realistic, diverse, and unforeseen human-vehicle interaction dynamics. We present SafeGen, a goal-conditioned diffusion framework for safety-critical scenario generation in VLMADs. Our key insight is to formulate scenario generation as a goal-conditioned diffusion process, where a predefined catastrophic end-state serves as a strong supervisory signal, guiding the generation of temporally coherent video trajectories that naturally evolve toward safety-critical outcomes. Building on this formulation, we introduce Context Grounded End State Reasoning, which leverages VLMs to analyze benign driving contexts and infer latent vulnerabilities in human-vehicle interactions, producing structured end-state specifications that induce high-risk scenarios. Conditioned on these targets, we further propose End State Conditioned Video Evolution, which grounds semantic threats into physically plausible visual dynamics. Specifically, we instantiate high-risk agents within the scene via depth-aware geometric projection, followed by boundary-conditioned diffusion to generate intermediate frames with consistent motion patterns and temporal coherence. Extensive experiments across 3 VLMADs demonstrate that SafeGen increases the Judge Overall Score, a metric using a VLM judge to evaluate VLMADs' understanding and decision-making, by 24.25% on average compared to SoTA baselines. Furthermore, fine-tuning a VLMAD improves performance in real-world driving scenes by an average of 15.9%.

Jiangfan Liu, Zexuan Cui, Tianyuan Zhang +7

Beihang University, China · Zhongguancun Laboratory, China · Chery Automobile Co., Ltd., China

Video Diffusion ModelsVLMs for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Safety EvaluationControllable Video GenerationAutonomous Driving Scenario Generation
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Jul 21, 2026

Learning Explicit Physical Parameter Control and Benchmarking for Video Generation

Recent advances in image-to-video generation have improved visual realism, making physically grounded and controllable dynamics an important step toward future world simulation. Current models often generate plausible motion, but it is not reliably governed by explicit physical causes, and instance-level constraints can leak or become entangled in multi-object interactions. We attribute this gap to two missing pieces: large-scale, fine-grained physical parameterization, and model designs that correctly bind physical attributes to instances and emphasize dynamics over appearance. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhyParam-Dataset, an interaction-centric collection of 130K physically simulated videos with dense physical parameterization, including force vectors, object material properties, and environmental constants across five representative rigid-body motion types. Built on this data, we present PhyParam, a physics-guided image-to-video diffusion model that conditions on object-level forces, masses, friction, restitution, and scene-level gravity via a lightweight physical-attention routing mechanism, and further improves motion learning with semantic-structural feature-space supervision. We also establish PhyParam-Bench, a benchmark for physical-law consistency in image-to-video generation, with a multi-level protocol evaluating temporal dynamics, spatial stability, and semantic--physical alignment. Experiments show that PhyParam improves physical consistency while maintaining high visual fidelity, advancing explicit rigid-body physical-parameter control for image-to-video generation. We will publicly release the dataset, benchmark, and code to support future research.

Yanxun Li, Hao Wen, Bingze Song +7

State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, SCSE, Beihang University · AMAP, Alibaba Group

Physical Consistency in Video GenerationImage-to-Video GenerationVideo Diffusion ModelsControllable Video GenerationVideo Generation Evaluation
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Jul 20, 2026

HOMIE: Human-object Centric Video Personalization via Multimodal Intelligent Enhancement

Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/

Yiyang Cai, Nan Chen, Rongchang Xie +8

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 20, 2026

ShotPlan: Cinematic Video Generation with Learnable Planning Token

Current video generation models achieve impressive results in single-shot generation, yet remain limited in cinematic video generation, where coherent narratives and effective multi-shot composition require explicit shot planning. To address this challenge, we propose ShotPlan, a framework for explicit multi-shot cinematic video generation built upon a video diffusion foundation model. Our method introduces learnable planning tokens that capture shot-level transition cues and can be seamlessly integrated with the original video generation tokens to control transition timestamps. Unlike standard video generation tokens, the proposed planning tokens are equipped with Fractional Temporal Rotary Position Embedding (FRoPE), enabling shot transitions to be modeled at the frame level. Experiments demonstrate that ShotPlan significantly outperforms existing cinematic video generation methods, offering more flexible shot management and stronger inter-shot consistency.

Su Guo, Guangce Liu, Haosen Yang +7

Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom · Harbin Institute of Technology

Video Diffusion ModelsVideo GenerationMulti-Shot Video GenerationControllable Video GenerationTemporal Consistency in Video Generation
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Jul 17, 2026

PhysAgent: Reflective Agentic Physics Control for Physically Plausible Video Generation

Recent advances in physics-grounded video generation leverage physics simulation as a physical prior to guide video synthesis toward physically plausible outcomes. The simulation process is controlled by physical specifications, which are typically generated by a vision-language model in a single pass. Such one-shot prediction often fails to accurately translate user intent into executable simulations, particularly for fine-grained object dynamics, complex motion trajectories, and temporally structured interactions. In this paper, we propose PhysAgent, a reflective agentic framework that closes the loop among physical program generation, physics simulation, stage-specific verification, and targeted program repair. Beyond improving the control of coupled physical parameters, our framework enables the agent to progressively realize complex trajectories, multi-stage interactions, and precise event outcomes by treating each physical program as an executable hypothesis. In addition, we design a set of physics-control APIs to support more stable and complex motion behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhysAgent produces more physically plausible videos, achieves better prompt alignment, and generalizes more effectively across diverse physical scenarios.

Qirui Li, Jinkun Hao, Yibo Li +3

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Cardiff University

Physical Consistency in Video GenerationAgentic Video GenerationVideo GenerationControllable Video GenerationPhysics-Based SimulationPhysics-Guided Video Generation
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Jul 17, 2026

PE-Field 4D: Video Generation Models as Canvas

Diffusion Transformers have recently achieved strong performance in video generation, yet controlling scene geometry under viewpoint changes and camera motion remains challenging. In this work, we revisit the role of positional encoding in video diffusion transformers and show that it provides a useful spatial bias for geometry-aware control. Specifically, if reference tokens are encoded according to their projected locations in the target view, the denoising model is encouraged to retrieve content from position aligned regions of the input video. Building on this observation, we introduce a geometry-aware cross-attention mechanism that enables target video latent tokens to attend to structured context tokens derived from reference images or frames. To establish correspondence between the reference content and the target camera trajectory, we equip the context tokens with a projected positional encoding scheme that combines target-view 2D reprojection with depth-aware disambiguation. At the same time, we preserve the original spatiotemporal positional encoding of the generated video latent, allowing geometric guidance to be injected while maintaining consistency with the video model's native latent structure. The resulting framework provides a simple and effective approach for controllable video generation. It improves spatial controllability in viewpoint-dependent editing tasks, including camera re-trajectory, novel-view video synthesis, and geometry-aware video editing, while preserving the generative prior of the underlying video diffusion model. The code is available at: https://github.com/MTLab/PE-Field.

Yunpeng Bai, Haoxiang Li, Qixing Huang

University of Texas at Austin, USA · Pixocial Technology, USA

Camera-Controlled Video GenerationDiffusion TransformerDynamic Novel View SynthesisVideo GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 15, 2026

KeyFrame-Compass: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Keyframe-Conditioned Video Generation

Video generation increasingly relies on keyframe-based workflows, where creators specify a sequence of reference images to guide generation. Although recent models support multi-keyframe conditioning, it remains unclear whether they can faithfully reproduce the prescribed keyframes while maintaining overall video quality. We present KeyFrame-Compass, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating keyframe-conditioned video generation. The benchmark contains 386 carefully curated samples spanning three application domains, two video structures, two prompt granularities, two conditioning formats, and four keyframe densities, enabling controlled analysis under diverse generation settings. We further introduce an automated evaluation framework that jointly measures keyframe execution and overall video quality. Specifically, we decompose keyframe execution into six complementary metrics covering presence, fidelity, temporal ordering, localization, persistence, and uniqueness, while assessing overall video quality through evidence-grounded MLLM judgments augmented with specialized perception models. Experiments on nine representative video generation systems reveal several fundamental limitations. Current models exhibit a clear trade-off between faithful keyframe execution and natural video synthesis. Their performance further degrades as keyframe constraints become denser and most open-source models also fail to interpret storyboard-grid inputs as temporally ordered keyframe sequences.

Yuqi Tang, Tengfei Liu, Yizheng Lai +18

HKUST(GZ) · Kling Team · PKU +7

Video Quality AssessmentControllable Video GenerationVideo Generation Evaluation
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Jul 15, 2026

M4^\text{4}World: A Multi-view Multimodal Driving World Model for Interactive Object Manipulation and Minute-long Streaming

Driving-world generation has emerged as a core capability for scalable autonomous-driving simulation, yet existing methods remain limited in object-level controllability and long-horizon stability. We present M4^\text{4}World, a Multi-view and Multimodal generative driving world model that synthesizes future surround-view video streams and synchronized LiDAR scans while supporting interactive object Manipulation and stable Minute-long streaming. Fine-grained object manipulation is realized through a flexible conditioning interface that supports explicit control over both the spatial layout and visual appearance of individual objects. Stable minute-long streaming, on the other hand, is achieved through a multi-stage training framework that enables online causal generation in only four denoising steps while maintaining coherent world dynamics throughout extended rollouts. Building on these components, we introduce an efficient few-clip post-training as well as a suite of visual reference-conditioned generation models, preserving general generation ability while allowing rare-case customization for long-tail controllability. To assess controllability beyond realism, we further introduce an automated VLM-based judging pipeline that evaluates scene-level condition adherence, view-wise object controllability, and cross-view object consistency. Comprehensive experiments show that M4^\text{4}World consistently delivers high generation quality, precise controllability, and stable minute-long streaming. Together with downstream long-tail augmentation and scene editing, these results demonstrate the potential of M4^\text{4}World for controllable, scalable driving simulation.

Ke Cheng, Hanqiao Ye, Lei Shi +8

1Meituan · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · 3Beijing Institute of Technology

Multi-View Video GenerationLong-Horizon Video GenerationWorld Models for Autonomous DrivingControllable Video GenerationAutonomous Driving SimulationAutonomous Driving Scenario Generation
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Jul 15, 2026

MultiAnimate: A Unified Framework for Controllable Multi-Character Animation

Recent advances in generative models and technological innovations have significantly addressed the fundamental challenges of character image animation. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on character animation from a single reference image, substantially limiting their applicability in scenarios such as multiple character interaction animation. To fill this gap, this paper introduces MultiAnimate, a comprehensive framework that enables concurrent animation of multiple characters within a shared environment while preserving both identity consistency and spatial relationships. The framework achieves these objectives through multiple well-designed mechanisms. First, we incorporate an identity-specific reference net that enables appearance extraction from multiple reference images, distinguishing MultiAnimate from existing approaches constrained to single reference inputs. Second, we implement an identity-aware pose encoder to address the character-pose binding challenge, wherein an attention mechanism enables the network to accurately differentiate and process multiple pose sequences during generation. Third, we introduce an interaction guider module that enhances the framework's capability to handle complex inter-character interactions by leveraging character-specific mask information, serving as an optional component that refines the pose sequences. Extensive experiments and ablation analyses demonstrate our framework's superiority in multiple character animation, particularly in scenarios involving complex motion sequences.

Zhongyi Zhang, Guangyuan Wang, Li Hu +6

School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Fuxing Road 100, Hefei, 230026, Anhui, China. · Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, Dengcai Road 1008, Hangzhou, 310023, Zhejiang, China. · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Jurong West, Singapore, 639798, Singapore, Singapore.

Identity-Preserving Video GenerationHuman Motion GenerationPose-Conditioned Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 14, 2026

WanToFight: Real-Time Generative Game Engine for Multi-Player Combat Interaction

We present WanToFight, a generative game engine that simulates real-time, two-player The King of Fighters '97 (KOF~'97) gameplay from keyboard input. Prior generative game engines target either single-player first-person settings or non-real-time cooperative scenarios; multi-player control, real-time inference, complex physical interaction, and adversarial gameplay have not been jointly addressed. WanToFight closes this gap with three components built on the Wan-1.3B video diffusion transformer: a streaming autoregressive generator with block-causal attention and a rolling KV cache; a visually grounded Player Association module that binds each player's keyboard signal to a character identity; and a gated, locally causal keyboard injection module trained with a single-player-to-full-gameplay curriculum. A four-step DMD-distilled student paired with a pruned VAE decoder sustains 30FPS at 512x384 on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 over the duration of a complete match. To our knowledge, WanToFight is the first generative game engine to combine multi-player control, real-time inference, complex physical interaction, and adversarial gameplay in one system.

Li Hu, Guangyuan Wang, Peng Zhang +1

Tongyi Lab, Alibaba

Action-Conditioned Video GenerationVideo Diffusion ModelsGame-Playing AgentsAutoregressive Video GenerationControllable Video Generation
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Jul 14, 2026

The GEST-Engine: From Event Graphs to Synthetic Video. A Full Technical Report

We present the GEST-Engine, a complete system that goes from natural-language text to fully-annotated multi-actor video. At its core is an explicit world model: rather than encoding state as a learned latent, the engine maintains a complete, inspectable representation of the world (which actors exist, where they are, what they are doing, which objects they hold, and how events relate in time and space), expressed as a formal Graph of Events in Space and Time (GEST) and realized deterministically inside the open world of a commercial game engine driven through an open-source multiplayer scripting framework. GESTs are produced either procedurally or by an agentic text-to-GEST system in which an LLM Director plans a story through tool calls validated by a programmatic state backend, so every generated specification is executable by construction. A GEST then enters a four-stage execution pipeline: graph parsing and validation, entity and action grounding, temporal orchestration (Allen-style constraints resolved by Floyd-Warshall transitive closure), and execution and capture. In a single simulation pass the engine emits frame-aligned RGB video, dense per-pixel depth, instance segmentation, per-actor skeletal pose, per-frame pairwise spatial-relation graphs, 2D bounding boxes, event-to-frame temporal mappings, and natural-language descriptions, all at zero marginal annotation cost. We further describe an in-game world editor, runtime capability extraction, a text-generation pipeline, and a production system that renders corpora at scale across parallel virtual machines. Because every frame traces back to a semantic specification, the engine guarantees object permanence, multi-actor coordination, and temporal consistency by construction, making its output valuable as training data, evaluation benchmarks, and diagnostic tools for video understanding.

Nicolae Cudlenco, Mihai Masala, Marius Leordeanu

Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania · Büchi Labortechnik AG, Flawil, Switzerland · National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Romania

Graph GenerationVideo GenerationControllable Video GenerationTemporal Consistency in Video Generation
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Jul 13, 2026

Controlling Motion Transfer in Diffusion Transformers via Attention Heads

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have advanced video generation with high-quality, temporally coherent results. However, extending them to motion transfer, which requires following reference motion while aligning with a target prompt, remains challenging due to limited understanding of motion and structure representations within DiTs. We analyze video DiTs at the attention-head level and identify distinct heads specialized for motion and spatial structure. Based on this insight, we propose a head-aware controllable motion transfer framework that requires no parameter updates. Our method refines motion cues from motion-specialized heads via semantic correspondence guidance and preserves structure through selective feature injection. This head-level control not only enables accurate motion transfer but also provides an interpretable foundation for controllable video generation with DiTs.

Sunyoung Jung, Jiwoo Park, Yoonseok Choi +3

Yonsei University · LG Electronics · University of California, Merced

Diffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion TransformerMotion RetargetingAttention MechanismsControllable Video Generation
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