mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Human Motion Generation: A Survey

arXiv 2307.10894 ↗First posted 20 Jul 2023cs.CVcited by 96

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Abstract (arXiv)

Human motion generation aims to generate natural human pose sequences and shows immense potential for real-world applications. Substantial progress has been made recently in motion data collection technologies and generation methods, laying the foundation for increasing interest in human motion generation. Most research within this field focuses on generating human motions based on conditional signals, such as text, audio, and scene contexts. While significant advancements have been made in recent years, the task continues to pose challenges due to the intricate nature of human motion and its implicit relationship with conditional signals. In this survey, we present a comprehensive literature review of human motion generation, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in this field. We begin by introducing the background of human motion and generative models, followed by an examination of representative methods for three mainstream sub-tasks: text-conditioned, audio-conditioned, and scene-conditioned human motion generation. Additionally, we provide an overview of common datasets and evaluation metrics. Lastly, we discuss open problems and outline potential future research directions. We hope that this survey could provide the community with a comprehensive glimpse of this rapidly evolving field and inspire novel ideas that address the outstanding challenges.

Key facts. Cited by 96 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 143 of its 223 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2023.

Builds on

143 of 223 references.

References · 143

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38 more
  1. 2017Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variationcited by 2,988
  2. 2016Improved Techniques for Training GANscited by 2,970
  3. 2022Video Diffusion Modelscited by 2,305
  4. 2015Variational Inference with Normalizing Flowscited by 2,170
  5. 2015Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 2,054
  6. 2019Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Imagecited by 1,612
  7. 2017Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environmentscited by 1,376
  8. 2019AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapescited by 1,236
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  11. 2022Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 1,179
  12. 2022Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 1,080
  13. 2016Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fieldscited by 1,064
  14. 2019The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spacescited by 904
  15. 2016NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysiscited by 686
  16. 2019VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimationcited by 620
  17. 2023T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representationscited by 588
  18. 2022Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Spacecited by 575
  19. 2019NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understandingcited by 533
  20. 2021Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitatcited by 511
  21. 2021Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAEcited by 501
  22. 2022TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptionscited by 492
  23. 2021AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++cited by 485
  24. 2020Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Imagescited by 477
  25. 2022GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Imagescited by 446
  26. 2020Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motionscited by 441
  27. 2022MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Spacecited by 408
  28. 2020GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objectscited by 405
  29. 20183D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised trainingcited by 403
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  33. 2021HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimationcited by 324
  34. 2016Ladder Variational Autoencoderscited by 318
  35. 2021StyleGAN-V: A Continuous Video Generator with the Price, Image Quality and Perks of StyleGAN2cited by 301
  36. 2019Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraintscited by 295
  37. 2022EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Musiccited by 287
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50 most cited of 143 All 143 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 25; 2025: 41; 2026: 27.

96 papers.

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  1. 2024Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generationcited by 91
  2. 2024RingID: Rethinking Tree-Ring Watermarking for Enhanced Multi-Key Identificationcited by 91
  3. 2024Seamless Human Motion Composition with Blended Positional Encodingscited by 80
  4. 2024Move as You Say, Interact as You Can: Language-guided Human Motion Generation with Scene Affordancecited by 80
  5. 2024Generating Human Interaction Motions in Scenes with Text Controlcited by 80
  6. 2025GENMO: A GENeralist Model for Human MOtioncited by 49
  7. 2025Motion Anything: Any to Motion Generationcited by 42
  8. 2023Motion Flow Matching for Human Motion Synthesis and Editingcited by 38
  9. 2024LaserHuman: Language-guided Scene-aware Human Motion Generation in Free Environmentcited by 33
  10. 2024Towards Variable and Coordinated Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generationcited by 29
  11. 2024in2IN: Leveraging individual Information to Generate Human INteractionscited by 29
  12. 2024A Comprehensive Survey on Human Video Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Insightscited by 25
38 more
  1. 2025A Survey on Human Interaction Motion Generationcited by 25
  2. 2025Human Motion Video Generation: A Surveycited by 25
  3. 2025Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Surveycited by 24
  4. 2024Freetalker: Controllable Speech and Text-Driven Gesture Generation Based on Diffusion Models for Enhanced Speaker Naturalnesscited by 18
  5. 2024A Cross-Dataset Study for Text-based 3D Human Motion Retrievalcited by 17
  6. 2024Aligning Human Motion Generation with Human Perceptionscited by 16
  7. 2024SAT-HMR: Real-Time Multi-Person 3D Mesh Estimation via Scale-Adaptive Tokenscited by 16
  8. 2025BioPose: Biomechanically-accurate 3D Pose Estimation from Monocular Videoscited by 16
  9. 2024SoPo: Text-to-Motion Generation Using Semi-Online Preference Optimizationcited by 15
  10. 2024A Survey on 3D Human Avatar Modeling -- From Reconstruction to Generationcited by 13
  11. 2025MixerMDM: Learnable Composition of Human Motion Diffusion Modelscited by 13
  12. 2025MOSPA: Human Motion Generation Driven by Spatial Audiocited by 12
  13. 2026LPM 1.0: Video-based Character Performance Modelcited by 11
  14. 2024Local Action-Guided Motion Diffusion Model for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 10
  15. 2024MotionRL: Align Text-to-Motion Generation to Human Preferences with Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learningcited by 10
  16. 2025HOI-Dyn: Learning Interaction Dynamics for Human-Object Motion Diffusioncited by 10
  17. 2026FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Compositioncited by 10
  18. 2023Social Motion Prediction with Cognitive Hierarchiescited by 9
  19. 2024Real-time Holistic Robot Pose Estimation with Unknown Statescited by 9
  20. 2025Align Your Rhythm: Generating Highly Aligned Dance Poses with Gating-Enhanced Rhythm-Aware Feature Representationcited by 8
  21. 2025Text-driven Motion Generation: Overview, Challenges and Directionscited by 8
  22. 2025Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarkscited by 8
  23. 2024Learning Generalizable Human Motion Generator with Reinforcement Learningcited by 7
  24. 2024Autonomous LLM-Enhanced Adversarial Attack for Text-to-Motioncited by 7
  25. 2025Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Modelscited by 6
  26. 2025MotionVerse: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Motion Comprehension, Generation and Editingcited by 5
  27. 2025MoSa: Motion Generation with Scalable Autoregressive Modelingcited by 5
  28. 2023FG-MDM: Towards Zero-Shot Human Motion Generation via ChatGPT-Refined Descriptionscited by 4
  29. 2024Replace Anyone in Videoscited by 4
  30. 2025VimoRAG: Video-based Retrieval-augmented 3D Motion Generation for Motion Language Modelscited by 4
  31. 2025Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interactioncited by 4
  32. 2025CoordSpeaker: Exploiting Gesture Captioning for Coordinated Caption-Empowered Co-Speech Gesture Generationcited by 4
  33. 2026Towards Motion Turing Test: Evaluating Human-Likeness in Humanoid Robotscited by 4
  34. 2024Return-Aligned Decision Transformercited by 3
  35. 2025Gen-C: Populating Virtual Worlds with Generative Crowdscited by 3
  36. 2025InteracTalker: Prompt-Based Human-Object Interaction with Co-Speech Gesture Generationcited by 3
  37. 2025Decoupled Generative Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Synthesiscited by 3
  38. 2025SegMo: Segment-aligned Text to 3D Human Motion Generationcited by 3

50 most cited of 96 All 96 (JSON)