# Single Motion Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05905/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 79 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [GaussianDreamer: Fast Generation from Text to 3D Gaussians by Bridging 2D and 3D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08529/) (2023)
- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [CG-HOI: Contact-Guided 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16097/) (2023)
- [Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03913/) (2023)
- [CLoSD: Closing the Loop between Simulation and Diffusion for multi-task character control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03441/) (2024)
- [Generative Image Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07906/) (2023)
- [Flexible Motion In-betweening with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11126/) (2024)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19652/) (2024)
- [The Chosen One: Consistent Characters in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10093/) (2023)
- [Interactive Character Control with Auto-Regressive Motion Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00416/) (2023)
- [AnyTop: Character Animation Diffusion with Any Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17327/) (2025)
- [Score-Guided Diffusion for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09623/) (2024)
- [MAS: Multi-view Ancestral Sampling for 3D motion generation using 2D diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14729/) (2023)
- [SMooDi: Stylized Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12783/) (2024)
- [Monkey See, Monkey Do: Harnessing Self-attention in Motion Diffusion for Zero-shot Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06508/) (2024)
- [Generative Human Motion Stylization in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13505/) (2024)
- [Sin3DM: Learning a Diffusion Model from a Single 3D Textured Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15399/) (2023)
- [NAP: Neural 3D Articulation Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16315/) (2023)
- [ZeroHSI: Zero-Shot 4D Human-Scene Interaction by Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18600/) (2024)
- [TASTE-Rob: Advancing Video Generation of Task-Oriented Hand-Object Interaction for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11423/) (2025)
- [Motion Avatar: Generate Human and Animal Avatars with Arbitrary Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11286/) (2024)
- [Pay Attention and Move Better: Harnessing Attention for Interactive Motion Generation and Training-free Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18977/) (2024)
- [Example-based Motion Synthesis via Generative Motion Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00378/) (2023)
- [KMM: Key Frame Mask Mamba for Extended Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06481/) (2024)
- [Dance Like a Chicken: Low-Rank Stylization for Human Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19557/) (2025)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14452/) (2024)
- [Articulated Kinematics Distillation from Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01204/) (2025)
- [T2LM: Long-Term 3D Human Motion Generation from Multiple Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00636/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthesizing realistic animations of humans, animals, and even imaginary creatures, has long been a goal for artists and computer graphics professionals. Compared to the imaging domain, which is rich with large available datasets, the number of data instances for the motion domain is limited, particularly for the animation of animals and exotic creatures (e.g., dragons), which have unique skeletons and motion patterns. In this work, we present a Single Motion Diffusion Model, dubbed SinMDM, a model designed to learn the internal motifs of a single motion sequence with arbitrary topology and synthesize motions of arbitrary length that are faithful to them. We harness the power of diffusion models and present a denoising network explicitly designed for the task of learning from a single input motion. SinMDM is designed to be a lightweight architecture, which avoids overfitting by using a shallow network with local attention layers that narrow the receptive field and encourage motion diversity. SinMDM can be applied in various contexts, including spatial and temporal in-betweening, motion expansion, style transfer, and crowd animation. Our results show that SinMDM outperforms existing methods both in quality and time-space efficiency. Moreover, while current approaches require additional training for different applications, our work facilitates these applications at inference time. Our code and trained models are available at https://sinmdm.github.io/SinMDM-page.