Cong Wang

Haoyu Zhao, Zhongang Qi, Cong Wang et al.

With diffusion transformer (DiT) excelling in video generation, its use in specific tasks has drawn increasing attention. However, adapting DiT for pose-guided human image animation faces two core challenges: (a) existing U-Net-based pose control methods may be suboptimal for the DiT backbone; and (b) removing text guidance, as in previous approaches, often leads to semantic loss and model degradation. To address these issues, we propose DynamiCtrl, a novel framework for human animation in video DiT architecture. Specifically, we use a shared VAE encoder for human images and driving poses, unifying them into a common latent space, maintaining pose fidelity, and eliminating the need for an expert pose encoder during video denoising. To integrate pose control into the DiT backbone effectively, we propose a novel Pose-adaptive Layer Norm model. It injects normalized pose features into the denoising process via conditioning on visual tokens, enabling seamless and scalable pose control across DiT blocks. Furthermore, to overcome the shortcomings of text removal, we introduce the "Joint-text" paradigm, which preserves the role of text embeddings to provide global semantic context. Through full-attention blocks, image and pose features are aligned with text features, enhancing semantic consistency, leveraging pretrained knowledge, and enabling multi-level control. Experiments verify the superiority of DynamiCtrl on benchmark and self-collected data (e.g., achieving the best LPIPS of 0.166), demonstrating strong character control and high-quality synthesis. The project page is available at https://gulucaptain.github.io/DynamiCtrl/.

Chuhan Zhang, Cong Wang, Wei Pan et al.

Inspired by the dynamic coupling of moto-neurons and physical elasticity in animals, this work explores the possibility of generating locomotion gaits by utilizing physical oscillations in a soft snake by means of a low-level spiking neural mechanism. To achieve this goal, we introduce the Double Threshold Spiking neuron model with adjustable thresholds to generate varied output patterns. This neuron model can excite the natural dynamics of soft robotic snakes, and it enables distinct movements, such as turning or moving forward, by simply altering the neural thresholds. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach, termed SpikingSoft, naturally pairs and integrates with reinforcement learning. The high-level agent only needs to adjust the two thresholds to generate complex movement patterns, thus strongly simplifying the learning of reactive locomotion. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture significantly enhances the performance of the soft snake robot, enabling it to achieve target objectives with a 21.6% increase in success rate, a 29% reduction in time to reach the target, and smoother movements compared to the vanilla reinforcement learning controllers or Central Pattern Generator controller acting in torque space.