Rebalancing Reference Frame Dominance to Improve Motion in Image-to-Video Models

Abstract:Image-to-video models often generate videos that remain overly static, compared to text-to-video models. While prior approaches mitigate this issue by weakening or modifying the image-conditioning signal, they often require additional training or sacrifice fidelity to the reference image. In this work, we identify reference-frame dominance as a key mechanism behind motion suppression. We observe that non-reference frames in I2V models allocate excessive self-attention to reference-frame key tokens, causing reference information to be over-propagated across time and suppressing inter-frame dynamics. Based on this finding, we propose DyMoS (Dynamic Motion Slider), a training-free and model-agnostic method that rebalances the attention pathway from generated frames to the reference frame during initial denoising steps. DyMoS leaves both the input image and model weights unchanged and introduces a single scalar parameter for continuous control over motion strength. Experiments across multiple state-of-the-art I2V backbones demonstrate that DyMoS consistently improves motion dynamics while maintaining visual quality and fidelity to the reference image.

Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project page: this https URL

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.19398 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2605.19398v4 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19398 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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