Identity-Preserving Video Generation

Overview

This field studies how to generate or edit video while keeping a referenced person or character recognizable across changes in pose, expression, viewpoint, clothing, and scene. Common approaches condition diffusion or video-transformer models on reference images or clips, using identity tokens, attention or lightweight adapters, multi-view cues, and separate controls for identity and motion. For longer videos and multiple subjects, systems also use keyframe anchors, entity memories, pose binding, or streaming caches to limit identity drift and confusion. A central challenge is balancing faithful identity with natural motion, prompt control, and visual variety, while evaluations still need to account for expression, occlusion, viewpoint, and consistency over time.

Latest papers

65 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Feb 28, 2026

WildActor: Unconstrained Identity-Preserving Video Generation

Production-ready human video generation requires digital actors to maintain strictly consistent full-body identities across dynamic shots, viewpoints and motions, a setting that remains challenging for existing methods. Prior methods often suffer from face-centric behavior that neglects body-level consistency, or produce copy-paste artifacts where subjects appear rigid due to pose locking. We present Actor-18M, a large-scale human video dataset designed to capture identity consistency under unconstrained viewpoints and environments. Actor-18M comprises 1.6M videos with 18M corresponding human images, covering both arbitrary views and canonical three-view representations. Leveraging Actor-18M, we propose WildActor, a framework for any-view conditioned human video generation. We introduce an Asymmetric Identity-Preserving Attention mechanism coupled with a Viewpoint-Adaptive Monte Carlo Sampling strategy that iteratively re-weights reference conditions by marginal utility for balanced manifold coverage. Evaluated on the proposed Actor-Bench, WildActor consistently preserves body identity under diverse shot compositions, large viewpoint transitions, and substantial motions, surpassing existing methods in these challenging settings.
Feb 23, 2026

ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representation

While diffusion models have shown great potential in portrait generation, generating expressive, coherent, and controllable cinematic portrait videos remains a significant challenge. Existing intermediate signals for portrait generation, such as 2D landmarks and parametric models, have limited disentanglement capabilities and cannot express personalized details due to their sparse or low-rank representation. Therefore, existing methods based on these models struggle to accurately preserve subject identity and expressions, hindering the generation of highly expressive portrait videos. To overcome these limitations, we propose a high-fidelity personalized head representation that more effectively disentangles expression and identity. This representation captures both static, subject-specific global geometry and dynamic, expression-related details. Furthermore, we introduce an expression transfer module to achieve personalized transfer of head pose and expression details between different identities. We use this sophisticated and highly expressive head model as a conditional signal to train a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based generator to synthesize richly detailed portrait videos. Extensive experiments on self- and cross-reenactment tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms previous models in terms of identity preservation, expression accuracy, and temporal stability, particularly in capturing fine-grained details of complex motion.
Jan 4, 2026

Slot-ID: Identity-Preserving Video Generation from Reference Videos via Slot-Based Temporal Identity Encoding

Human identity-preserving text-to-video generation remains challenging under large changes in viewpoint, facial expression, illumination, and motion. Existing methods condition the generator on a single reference portrait, but a static image cannot capture how identity-bearing cues evolve across views and expressions, leading to face deformation, pose locking, identity drift, or over-smoothed faces. We observe that a short reference clip naturally provides richer temporal and multi-view identity cues than any single image, motivating a video-referential formulation. This richer signal, however, introduces a new challenge: identity evidence is distributed across many frames and must be distilled into a compact, stable representation under a limited token budget. To this end, we propose Slot-ID, a lightweight identity-conditioning framework built on a frozen text-to-video backbone. Slot-ID employs a slot-based temporal identity encoder with Sinkhorn-routed iterative reading to distill a compact, stable set of identity tokens from the reference clip, complemented by an image-anchor stream for dual-source conditioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Slot-ID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity preservation and visual naturalness while remaining competitive in prompt following, with particularly large gains under challenging pose, expression, and motion variations.
Dec 8, 2025

ContextAnyone: Context-Aware Diffusion for Character-Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

Text-to-video generation has advanced rapidly, yet preserving a character's holistic appearance from a single reference image remains challenging, particularly when the character undergoes large pose, motion, and scene changes. Existing reference-conditioned approaches primarily treat the reference image as a conditioning signal, which can weaken fine-grained appearance information as reference and noisy video tokens interact during denoising. We propose ContextAnyone, a context-aware diffusion framework that instead treats the reference as an explicitly preserved appearance anchor. Our key idea is to jointly reconstruct the reference image and generate the target video within a shared diffusion transformer, providing direct supervision for preserving identity and fine-grained appearance throughout denoising. To maintain the reference as a stable source of appearance information, we further introduce asymmetric information flow that allows video tokens to selectively access reference tokens while preventing noisy video features from propagating back to the reference branch. We complement this design with Gap-RoPE, which separates the positional representations of the reference and generated video tokens. Experiments on a benchmark constructed from OpenVid-HD demonstrate that ContextAnyone improves both identity and fine-grained appearance consistency over existing reference-conditioned baselines while maintaining motion characteristics close to the underlying text-to-video generator.
Apr 23, 2025

Learning Zero-Shot Subject-Driven Video Generation Using 1% Compute

Subject-driven video generation (SDV-Gen) aims to produce videos of a specific subject by adapting a pretrained video model, enabling personalized and application-driven content creation. To achieve this goal, per-subject tuning methods require approximately 200 A100 GPU hours to generate a customized video, whereas zero-shot methods avoid per-subject tuning but typically rely on millions of subject-video pairs for the supervision, incurring massive network fine-tuning costs (10K-200K A100 GPU hours). We propose a data- and compute-efficient zero-shot SDV-Gen framework that avoids test-time per-subject tuning and the use of large-scale subject-video pairs. Our key idea decomposes SDV-Gen into (i) identity injection learned from subject-image pairs and (ii) motion-awareness preservation maintained by a small set of arbitrary videos. We optimize the two tasks with stochastic switching, using random reference-frame sampling and image-token dropout to prevent trivial first-frame copying. Our gradient analysis shows that the two objectives rapidly evolve toward nearly orthogonal update subspaces, explaining the stable optimization. Using CogVideoX-5B, we adapt a single model with 200K subject-image pairs and 4,000 arbitrary videos in 288 A100 GPU hours. This yields about 1% of compute compared to prior zero-shot baselines (i.e., 0.4% of VACE and 2.8% of Phantom) while using no subject-video pairs, yet remaining competitive in subject fidelity and motion quality. We show that the same recipe transfers to Wan 2.1-1.3B and Wan 2.2-5B.