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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Control

Xiangbo Gao, Renjie Li, Xinghao Chen, Yuheng Wu, Suofei Feng, Jie Yang, Qing Yin, Zhengzhong Tu

Abstract

AI video generation is moving beyond general generation, which relies on exhaustive prompt-engineering and "cherry-picking", towards fine-grained, controllable generation and high-fidelity post-processing. In professional AI-assisted filmmaking, the core requirement is the ability to perform precise, targeted modifications. A key task is video instance insertion, which requires precise spatial-temporal placement, physically consistent scene interaction (e.g., shadows and reflections), and the faithful preservation of original dynamics - all achieved under minimal user effort. In this paper, we propose PISCO, a video diffusion model for precise video instance insertion with arbitrary sparse keyframe control. PISCO allows users to specify a single keyframe, start-and-end keyframes, or sparse keyframes at arbitrary timestamps, and automatically propagates object appearance, motion, and interaction. To stabilize generation under sparse conditioning, we introduce Variable-Information Guidance and Distribution-Preserving Temporal Masking, complemented by geometry-aware conditioning. We further construct PISCO-Bench, a benchmark with verified instance annotations and paired clean background videos, and evaluate performance using both reference-based and reference-free perceptual metrics. Experiments demonstrate that PISCO consistently outperforms existing baselines and scales effectively as additional control signals are provided.

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