# MoDi: Unconditional Motion Synthesis from Diverse Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08010/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [Assessing Generative Models via Precision and Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00035/) (2018)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [Robust Motion In-betweening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04942/) (2021)
- [DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08386/) (2020)
- [HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09561/) (2017)
- [Skeleton-Aware Networks for Deep Motion Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05732/) (2020)
- [We are More than Our Joints: Predicting how 3D Bodies Move](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00619/) (2020)
- [Human Motion Prediction via Spatio-Temporal Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05478/) (2018)
- [Text2Gestures: A Transformer-Based Network for Generating Emotive Body Gestures for Virtual Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11101/) (2021)
- [Structured Prediction Helps 3D Human Motion Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09070/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19759/) (2024)
- [TLControl: Trajectory and Language Control for Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17135/) (2023)
- [EMDM: Efficient Motion Diffusion Model for Fast and High-Quality Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02256/) (2023)
- [Single Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05905/) (2023)
- [InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19652/) (2024)
- [Make-An-Animation: Large-Scale Text-conditional 3D Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09662/) (2023)
- [ParCo: Part-Coordinating Text-to-Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18512/) (2024)
- [ReGenNet: Towards Human Action-Reaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11882/) (2024)
- [Generating Human Motion in 3D Scenes from Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07784/) (2024)
- [Motion Flow Matching for Human Motion Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08895/) (2023)
- [MAS: Multi-view Ancestral Sampling for 3D motion generation using 2D diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14729/) (2023)
- [Monkey See, Monkey Do: Harnessing Self-attention in Motion Diffusion for Zero-shot Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06508/) (2024)
- [InterHandGen: Two-Hand Interaction Generation via Cascaded Reverse Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17422/) (2024)
- [HMD^2: Environment-aware Motion Generation from Single Egocentric Head-Mounted Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13426/) (2024)
- [AI-Generated Content (AIGC) for Various Data Modalities: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14177/) (2023)
- [ChainHOI: Joint-based Kinematic Chain Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13130/) (2025)
- [Pay Attention and Move Better: Harnessing Attention for Interactive Motion Generation and Training-free Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18977/) (2024)
- [Modiff: Action-Conditioned 3D Motion Generation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03949/) (2023)
- [UniEgoMotion: A Unified Model for Egocentric Motion Reconstruction, Forecasting, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01126/) (2025)
- [Example-based Motion Synthesis via Generative Motion Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00378/) (2023)
- [Tri-Modal Motion Retrieval by Learning a Joint Embedding Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00691/) (2024)
- [3DiFACE: Diffusion-based Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00870/) (2023)
- [FineMotion: A Dataset and Benchmark with both Spatial and Temporal Annotation for Fine-grained Motion Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19850/) (2025)
- [MotionMix: Weakly-Supervised Diffusion for Controllable Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11115/) (2024)
- [Constrained Diffusion with Trust Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10932/) (2024)
- [Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05419/) (2025)
- [ARFlow: Human Action-Reaction Flow Matching with Physical Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16973/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The emergence of neural networks has revolutionized the field of motion synthesis. Yet, learning to unconditionally synthesize motions from a given distribution remains challenging, especially when the motions are highly diverse. In this work, we present MoDi -- a generative model trained in an unsupervised setting from an extremely diverse, unstructured and unlabeled dataset. During inference, MoDi can synthesize high-quality, diverse motions. Despite the lack of any structure in the dataset, our model yields a well-behaved and highly structured latent space, which can be semantically clustered, constituting a strong motion prior that facilitates various applications including semantic editing and crowd simulation. In addition, we present an encoder that inverts real motions into MoDi's natural motion manifold, issuing solutions to various ill-posed challenges such as completion from prefix and spatial editing. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments achieve state-of-the-art results that outperform recent SOTA techniques. Code and trained models are available at https://sigal-raab.github.io/MoDi.