MultiAnimate: Pose-Guided Image Animation Made Extensible

Yingcheng Hu, Haowen Gong, Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu, Songhua Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 9306-9316

Pose-guided human image animation aims to synthesize realistic videos of a reference character driven by a sequence of poses. While diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable success, most existing approaches are limited to single-character animation. We observe that naively extending these methods to multi-character scenarios often leads to identity confusion and implausible occlusions between characters. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an extensible multi-character image animation framework built upon modern Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation. At its core, our framework introduces two novel components--Identifier Assigner and Identifier Adapter--which collaboratively capture per-person positional cues and inter-person spatial relationships. This mask-driven scheme, along with a scalable training strategy, not only enhances flexibility but also enables generalization to scenarios with more characters than those seen during training. Remarkably, trained on only a two-character dataset, our model generalizes to multi-character animation while maintaining compatibility with single-character cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-character image animation, surpassing existing diffusion-based baselines. Codes will be released.