Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts

Yuang Wang, Chao Wen, Haoyu Guo, Sida Peng, Minghan Qin, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 12713-12724

We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality tradeoff: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dynamic transferability, we propose to "render" actions into precise visual prompts as domain-agnostic representations that preserve both geometric precision and cross-domain adaptability for complex actions; specifically, we choose visual skeletons for its generality and accessibility. We propose robust pipelines to construct skeletons from two interaction-rich data sources -- human-object interactions (HOI) and dexterous robotic manipulation -- enabling cross-domain training of action-driven generative models. By integrating visual skeletons into pretrained video generation models via lightweight fine-tuning, we enable precise action control of complex interaction while preserving the learning of cross-domain dynamics. Experiments on EgoVid, RT-1 and DROID demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.