# Interaction Transformer for Human Reaction Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01685/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [SPViT: Enabling Faster Vision Transformers via Soft Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13890/) (2021)
- [Character-Level Language Modeling with Deeper Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04444/) (2018)
- [A Spatio-temporal Transformer for 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08692/) (2020)
- [Transformer-Based Attention Networks for Continuous Pixel-Wise Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12091/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Spatial and Temporal Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07404/) (2020)
- [Learning Speech-driven 3D Conversational Gestures from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06837/) (2021)
- [Space-Time-Separable Graph Convolutional Network for Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04573/) (2021)
- [ActFormer: A GAN-based Transformer towards General Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07706/) (2022)
- [Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16051/) (2022)
- [Towards Social Artificial Intelligence: Nonverbal Social Signal Prediction in A Triadic Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04158/) (2019)
- [Learning Diverse Stochastic Human-Action Generators by Learning Smooth Latent Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10150/) (2019)
- [Pose Transformers (POTR): Human Motion Prediction with Non-Autoregressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07531/) (2021)
- [Learning Conditioned Graph Structures for Interpretable Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07243/) (2018)
- [To React or not to React: End-to-End Visual Pose Forecasting for Personalized Avatar during Dyadic Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02181/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Inter-X: Towards Versatile Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16051/) (2023)
- [ReMoS: 3D Motion-Conditioned Reaction Synthesis for Two-Person Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17057/) (2023)
- [ReGenNet: Towards Human Action-Reaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11882/) (2024)
- [InterMask: 3D Human Interaction Generation via Collaborative Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10010/) (2024)
- [FreeMotion: A Unified Framework for Number-free Text-to-Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15763/) (2024)
- [Ready-to-React: Online Reaction Policy for Two-Character Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20370/) (2025)
- [Interactive Humanoid: Online Full-Body Motion Reaction Synthesis with Social Affordance Canonicalization and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08983/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Human Interaction Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12763/) (2025)
- [DuetGen: Music Driven Two-Person Dance Generation via Hierarchical Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18680/) (2025)
- [Towards Immersive Human-X Interaction: A Real-Time Framework for Physically Plausible Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02106/) (2025)
- [Graph Transformer GANs for Graph-Constrained House Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08225/) (2023)
- [Closely Interactive Human Reconstruction with Proxemics and Physics-Guided Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11291/) (2024)
- [PhysReaction: Physically Plausible Real-Time Humanoid Reaction Synthesis via Forward Dynamics Guided 4D Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01081/) (2024)
- [HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/) (2025)
- [SocialGen: Modeling Multi-Human Social Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22906/) (2025)
- [Synergy and Synchrony in Couple Dances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04440/) (2024)
- [3D Human Interaction Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13120/) (2025)
- [Think-Then-React: Towards Unconstrained Human Action-to-Reaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16451/) (2025)
- [ARFlow: Human Action-Reaction Flow Matching with Physical Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16973/) (2025)
- [Ponimator: Unfolding Interactive Pose for Versatile Human-human Interaction Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14976/) (2025)
- [EgoReAct: Egocentric Video-Driven 3D Human Reaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22808/) (2025)
- [M3Act: Learning from Synthetic Human Group Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16772/) (2023)
- [Graph Transformer GANs with Graph Masked Modeling for Architectural Layout Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07721/) (2024)
- [Two-Person Interaction Augmentation with Skeleton Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05490/) (2024)
- [MotionVerse: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Motion Comprehension, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23635/) (2025)
- [InterAgent: Physics-based Multi-agent Command Execution via Diffusion on Interaction Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07410/) (2025)
- [HINT: Hierarchical Interaction Modeling for Autoregressive Multi-Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20383/) (2026)
- [ARMFlow: AutoRegressive MeanFlow for Online 3D Human Reaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16234/) (2025)
- [Poly-Autoregressive Prediction for Modeling Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08646/) (2025)
- [A Plug-and-Play Multi-Criteria Guidance for Diverse In-Betweening Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01590/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the challenging task of human reaction generation, which aims to generate a corresponding reaction based on an input action. Most of the existing works do not focus on generating and predicting the reaction and cannot generate the motion when only the action is given as input. To address this limitation, we propose a novel interaction Transformer (InterFormer) consisting of a Transformer network with both temporal and spatial attention. Specifically, temporal attention captures the temporal dependencies of the motion of both characters and of their interaction, while spatial attention learns the dependencies between the different body parts of each character and those which are part of the interaction. Moreover, we propose using graphs to increase the performance of spatial attention via an interaction distance module that helps focus on nearby joints from both characters. Extensive experiments on the SBU interaction, K3HI, and DuetDance datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InterFormer. Our method is general and can be used to generate more complex and long-term interactions. We also provide videos of generated reactions and the code with pre-trained models at https://github.com/CRISTAL-3DSAM/InterFormer