# MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 400 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [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)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [MAGVIT: Masked Generative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05199/) (2022)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10658/) (2022)
- [ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01116/) (2023)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [MAGE: MAsked Generative Encoder to Unify Representation Learning and Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09117/) (2022)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 400)

- [MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19759/) (2024)
- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)
- [MotionLLM: Understanding Human Behaviors from Human Motions and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20340/) (2024)
- [MotionStreamer: Streaming Motion Generation via Diffusion-based Autoregressive Model in Causal Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15451/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16575/) (2024)
- [DartControl: A Diffusion-Based Autoregressive Motion Model for Real-Time Text-Driven Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05260/) (2024)
- [Uni3C: Unifying Precisely 3D-Enhanced Camera and Human Motion Controls for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14899/) (2025)
- [Go to Zero: Towards Zero-shot Motion Generation with Million-scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07095/) (2025)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [MotionFix: Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00712/) (2024)
- [LaMP: Language-Motion Pretraining for Motion Generation, Retrieval, and Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07093/) (2024)
- [MotionGPT-2: A General-Purpose Motion-Language Model for Motion Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21747/) (2024)
- [BAMM: Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19435/) (2024)
- [ScaMo: Exploring the Scaling Law in Autoregressive Motion Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14559/) (2024)
- [GENMO: A GENeralist Model for Human MOtion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01425/) (2025)
- [Motion-Agent: A Conversational Framework for Human Motion Generation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17013/) (2024)
- [InterMask: 3D Human Interaction Generation via Collaborative Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10010/) (2024)
- [SnapMoGen: Human Motion Generation from Expressive Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09122/) (2025)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)
- [GestureLSM: Latent Shortcut based Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Spatial-Temporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18898/) (2025)
- [Motion Anything: Any to Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06955/) (2025)
- [MoGenTS: Motion Generation based on Spatial-Temporal Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17686/) (2024)
- [AnyTop: Character Animation Diffusion with Any Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17327/) (2025)
- [SALAD: Skeleton-aware Latent Diffusion for Text-driven Motion Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13836/) (2025)
- [M3GPT: An Advanced Multimodal, Multitask Framework for Motion Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16273/) (2024)
- [MaskControl: Spatio-Temporal Control for Masked Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10780/) (2024)
- [SMooDi: Stylized Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12783/) (2024)
- [MotionGPT3: Human Motion as a Second Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24086/) (2025)
- [Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15546/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce MoMask, a novel masked modeling framework for text-driven 3D human motion generation. In MoMask, a hierarchical quantization scheme is employed to represent human motion as multi-layer discrete motion tokens with high-fidelity details. Starting at the base layer, with a sequence of motion tokens obtained by vector quantization, the residual tokens of increasing orders are derived and stored at the subsequent layers of the hierarchy. This is consequently followed by two distinct bidirectional transformers. For the base-layer motion tokens, a Masked Transformer is designated to predict randomly masked motion tokens conditioned on text input at training stage. During generation (i.e. inference) stage, starting from an empty sequence, our Masked Transformer iteratively fills up the missing tokens; Subsequently, a Residual Transformer learns to progressively predict the next-layer tokens based on the results from current layer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoMask outperforms the state-of-art methods on the text-to-motion generation task, with an FID of 0.045 (vs e.g. 0.141 of T2M-GPT) on the HumanML3D dataset, and 0.228 (vs 0.514) on KIT-ML, respectively. MoMask can also be seamlessly applied in related tasks without further model fine-tuning, such as text-guided temporal inpainting.