ProxyUp: Training-Free Proxy-Conditioned Video Generation for Controllable Dynamics

Zanwei Zhou, Jiazhong Cen, Jiemin Fang, Yumeng He, Chen Yang, Sikuang Li, Fanpeng Meng, Zhikuan Bao, Wei Shen, Qi Tian

Precise control over complex dynamics remains challenging for modern video generative models, as text prompts alone often cannot specify physically plausible, fine-grained motion and interactions. We introduce $\textit{proxy-conditioned video generation}$, where a coarse proxy video from physics-based simulation or real-world recording serves as a dynamics carrier to control foreground object motion. Given a proxy video and a text prompt, the goal is to synthesize a new video that preserves the proxy dynamics while generating novel content and plausible interactions aligned with the prompt. Since paired proxy-target videos are difficult to obtain, we propose $\textbf{ProxyUp}$, a training-free framework built on pretrained video generative models. ProxyUp first inverts the proxy video into an intermediate latent representation and applies $\textbf{region-wise latent noising}$, preserving motion-critical proxy latents while injecting noise into regions intended for text-driven regeneration. To mitigate the distribution mismatch and weak foreground-background coupling introduced by this heuristic latent composition, we further propose $\textbf{Stochastic Flow Relaxation (SFR)}$, which progressively relaxes the composed latent toward the model's learned distribution before ODE sampling. Experiments on both simulation and real-world proxies show that ProxyUp outperforms strong video editing and motion transfer baselines in dynamic fidelity and text alignment.