# Residual Force Control for Agile Human Behavior Imitation and Extended Motion Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07364/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06456/) (2023)
- [GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01524/) (2021)
- [Learning Human-to-Humanoid Real-Time Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04436/) (2024)
- [Universal Humanoid Motion Representations for Physics-Based Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04582/) (2023)
- [MaskedMimic: Unified Physics-Based Character Control Through Masked Motion Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14393/) (2024)
- [SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00683/) (2021)
- [CLoSD: Closing the Loop between Simulation and Diffusion for multi-task character control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03441/) (2024)
- [Dynamics-Regulated Kinematic Policy for Egocentric Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05969/) (2021)
- [InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20390/) (2025)
- [Neural Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture with Physical Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01057/) (2021)
- [Physics-based Human Motion Estimation and Synthesis from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09913/) (2021)
- [C·ASE: Learning Conditional Adversarial Skill Embeddings for Physics-based Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11351/) (2023)
- [Physically Plausible Full-Body Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07907/) (2023)
- [StableMoFusion: Towards Robust and Efficient Diffusion-based Motion Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05691/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-aid Inertial Poser: Large-scale Human Motion Capture by Sparse Inertial and LiDAR Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15410/) (2022)
- [D&D: Learning Human Dynamics from Dynamic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08790/) (2022)
- [Differentiable Dynamics for Articulated 3d Human Motion Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12256/) (2022)
- [Trajectory Optimization for Physics-Based Reconstruction of 3d Human Pose from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12292/) (2022)
- [Diverse Human Motion Prediction Guided by Multi-Level Spatial-Temporal Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04860/) (2023)
- [PACE: Human and Camera Motion Estimation from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13768/) (2023)
- [LaserHuman: Language-guided Scene-aware Human Motion Generation in Free Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13307/) (2024)
- [Neural MoCon: Neural Motion Control for Physically Plausible Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14065/) (2022)
- [QuestEnvSim: Environment-Aware Simulated Motion Tracking from Sparse Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05666/) (2023)
- [PoseTriplet: Co-evolving 3D Human Pose Estimation, Imitation, and Hallucination under Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15625/) (2022)
- [MoCapAct: A Multi-Task Dataset for Simulated Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07363/) (2022)
- [PACER+: On-Demand Pedestrian Animation Controller in Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19722/) (2024)
- [HMP: Hand Motion Priors for Pose and Shape Estimation from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16737/) (2023)
- [Lodge++: High-quality and Long Dance Generation with Vivid Choreography Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20389/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise for synthesizing realistic human behaviors by learning humanoid control policies from motion capture data. However, it is still very challenging to reproduce sophisticated human skills like ballet dance, or to stably imitate long-term human behaviors with complex transitions. The main difficulty lies in the dynamics mismatch between the humanoid model and real humans. That is, motions of real humans may not be physically possible for the humanoid model. To overcome the dynamics mismatch, we propose a novel approach, residual force control (RFC), that augments a humanoid control policy by adding external residual forces into the action space. During training, the RFC-based policy learns to apply residual forces to the humanoid to compensate for the dynamics mismatch and better imitate the reference motion. Experiments on a wide range of dynamic motions demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of convergence speed and the quality of learned motions. Notably, we showcase a physics-based virtual character empowered by RFC that can perform highly agile ballet dance moves such as pirouette, arabesque and jet'e. Furthermore, we propose a dual-policy control framework, where a kinematic policy and an RFC-based policy work in tandem to synthesize multi-modal infinite-horizon human motions without any task guidance or user input. Our approach is the first humanoid control method that successfully learns from a large-scale human motion dataset (Human3.6M) and generates diverse long-term motions. Code and videos are available at https://www.ye-yuan.com/rfc.