# The KIT Motion-Language Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.03827 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/

## Key facts

- Cited by 338 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 338)

- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01116/) (2023)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05684/) (2023)
- [TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00976/) (2023)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)
- [TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04066/) (2022)
- [MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19759/) (2024)
- [MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10900/) (2023)
- [MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03596/) (2023)
- [State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07204/) (2023)
- [AttT2M: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Multi-Perspective Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00796/) (2023)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [Motion Mamba: Efficient and Long Sequence Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07487/) (2024)
- [FineMoGen: Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Motion Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15004/) (2023)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)
- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [Inter-X: Towards Versatile Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16051/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10894/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Linking human motion and natural language is of great interest for the generation of semantic representations of human activities as well as for the generation of robot activities based on natural language input. However, while there have been years of research in this area, no standardized and openly available dataset exists to support the development and evaluation of such systems. We therefore propose the KIT Motion-Language Dataset, which is large, open, and extensible. We aggregate data from multiple motion capture databases and include them in our dataset using a unified representation that is independent of the capture system or marker set, making it easy to work with the data regardless of its origin. To obtain motion annotations in natural language, we apply a crowd-sourcing approach and a web-based tool that was specifically build for this purpose, the Motion Annotation Tool. We thoroughly document the annotation process itself and discuss gamification methods that we used to keep annotators motivated. We further propose a novel method, perplexity-based selection, which systematically selects motions for further annotation that are either under-represented in our dataset or that have erroneous annotations. We show that our method mitigates the two aforementioned problems and ensures a systematic annotation process. We provide an in-depth analysis of the structure and contents of our resulting dataset, which, as of October 10, 2016, contains 3911 motions with a total duration of 11.23 hours and 6278 annotations in natural language that contain 52,903 words. We believe this makes our dataset an excellent choice that enables more transparent and comparable research in this important area.