Bitrate-Controlled Diffusion for Disentangling Motion and Content in Video

We propose a novel and general framework to disentangle video data into its dynamic motion and static content components. Our proposed method is a self-supervised pipeline with less assumptions and inductive biases than previous works: it utilizes a transformer-based architecture to jointly generate flexible implicit features for frame-wise motion and clip-wise content, and incorporates a low-bitrate vector quantization as an information bottleneck to promote disentanglement and form a meaningful discrete motion space. The bitrate-controlled latent motion and content are used as conditional inputs to a denoising diffusion model to facilitate self-supervised representation learning. We validate our disentangled representation learning framework on real world talking head videos with motion transfer and autoregressive motion generation tasks. Furthermore, we also show that our method can generalize to other type of video data, such as pixel sprites of $2 D$ cartoon characters. Our work presents a new perspective on self-supervised learning of disentangled video representations, contributing to the broader field of video analysis and generation.