Compact Motion Embeddings for Feed-forward Unified Human Animation

Seonwook Park, Hyunsoo Cha, Amrita Mazumdar, Shengze Wang, Tianye Li +3

Animating a reference image with a driver's motion requires a motion representation that captures face, hand, and body articulation but excludes the driver's appearance. Most body animation methods take motion from external pose estimators and render it with many denoising steps; compact learned motion representations mostly cover the face. We present FUHA, a real-time-capable feed-forward transformer that learns a compact motion embedding of the whole human and uses it for face, upper-body, and full-body animation. A Q-Former compresses the driver's features from a frozen visual encoder into this embedding. To disentangle motion from appearance, a novel contrastive loss pulls it toward the motion embedding of the driver's rendered keypoint image and away from that of the same person in another pose. At inference time, FUHA needs no external pose estimators, keypoints, or parametric body models. As a retrieval key, the motion embedding matches body pose better than the learned global embeddings of ten vision encoders. Its same-person retrieval rate is 0.1%, against 9.5% for its own DINOv3 backbone. On our upper-body benchmark, FUHA outperforms all baselines on every…