PAI-Actor: Cinematic Multi-Character Replacement in Dynamic Scenes

2026-09-05

Abstract

We present PAI-Actor, a cinematic multi-character animation framework for character replacement in dynamic movie scenes. Unlike conventional animation systems that mainly drive a single static image or a single subject, our goal is to replace and animate multiple characters within real video clips while preserving the original scene dynamics, camera motion, and background content. This setting is particularly challenging because the generated characters must remain consistent with the source performance in motion and interaction, while also matching the surrounding background in lighting, shadow, composition, and overall cinematic appearance. To address this, we formulate multi-character animation as a structure-guided human recovery problem and build a movie-driven training pipeline from high-quality film data. Furthermore, to support practical cinematic production, we introduce a bidirectional-to-autoregressive distillation framework: we first train a bidirectional diffusion transformer for high-quality short-clip generation at 1080P resolution, and then distill it into an autoregressive video-to-video model for efficient inference and longer video generation. Experiments show that PAI-Actor enables high-fidelity multi-character animation with strong scene consistency, cinematic visual quality, and efficient long-form generation.

Problem

• multi-character animation
• dynamic scenes
• scene consistency
• cinematic visual quality

Innovation

• multi-character animation
• structure-guided human recovery
• bidirectional-to-autoregressive distillation
• high-fidelity