Title: MIMIC: Mask-Injected Manipulation Video Generation with Interaction Control
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: video diffusion model, manipulation video

Abstract: Embodied intelligence faces a fundamental bottleneck from limited large-scale interaction data. Video generation offers a scalable alternative, but manipulation videos remain particularly challenging, as they require capturing subtle, contact-rich dynamics. Despite recent advances, video diffusion models still struggle to balance semantic understanding with fine-grained visual details, restricting their effectiveness in manipulation scenarios. Our key insight is that reference videos provide rich semantic and motion cues that can effectively drive manipulation video generation. Building on this, we propose MIMIC, a two-stage image-to-video diffusion framework. (1) We first introduce an Interaction-Motion-Aware (IMA) module to fuse visual features from the reference video, producing coherent semantic masks that correspond to the target image. (2) then utilize these masks as semantic control signals to guide the video generation process. Moreover, considering the ambiguity of the motion attribution,  we introduce a Pair Prompt Control mechanism to disentangle object and camera motion by adding the reference video as an additional input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIMIC significantly outperforms existing methods, effectively preserves manipulation intent and motion details, even when handling diverse and deformable objects. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of reference-driven semantics for controllable and realistic manipulation video generation.