DreamActor-M1: Holistic, Expressive and Robust Human Image Animation
  with Hybrid Guidance
Authors: name: Yuxuan Luo; name: Zhengkun Rong; name: Lizhen Wang; name: Longhao Zhang; name: Tianshu Hu; name: Yongming Zhu
Published: 2025-04-02 13:30:32

Abstract: While recent image-based human animation methods achieve realistic body and
facial motion synthesis, critical gaps remain in fine-grained holistic
controllability, multi-scale adaptability, and long-term temporal coherence,
which leads to their lower expressiveness and robustness. We propose a
diffusion transformer (DiT) based framework, DreamActor-M1, with hybrid
guidance to overcome these limitations. For motion guidance, our hybrid control
signals that integrate implicit facial representations, 3D head spheres, and 3D
body skeletons achieve robust control of facial expressions and body movements,
while producing expressive and identity-preserving animations. For scale
adaptation, to handle various body poses and image scales ranging from
portraits to full-body views, we employ a progressive training strategy using
data with varying resolutions and scales. For appearance guidance, we integrate
motion patterns from sequential frames with complementary visual references,
ensuring long-term temporal coherence for unseen regions during complex
movements. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the
state-of-the-art works, delivering expressive results for portraits,
upper-body, and full-body generation with robust long-term consistency. Project
Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M1/.