# MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03596 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03596/

## Key facts

- Cited by 131 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [CogView2: Faster and Better Text-to-Image Generation via Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14217/) (2022)
- [EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10658/) (2022)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 131)

- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [LaMP: Language-Motion Pretraining for Motion Generation, Retrieval, and Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07093/) (2024)
- [BAMM: Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19435/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15546/) (2026)
- [MotionLab: Unified Human Motion Generation and Editing via the Motion-Condition-Motion Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02358/) (2025)
- [in2IN: Leveraging individual Information to Generate Human INteractions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09988/) (2024)
- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [TIMotion: Temporal and Interactive Framework for Efficient Human-Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17135/) (2024)
- [InfiniMotion: Mamba Boosts Memory in Transformer for Arbitrary Long Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10061/) (2024)
- [KinMo: Kinematic-aware Human Motion Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15472/) (2024)
- [ChainHOI: Joint-based Kinematic Chain Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13130/) (2025)
- [DisCoRD: Discrete Tokens to Continuous Motion via Rectified Flow Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19527/) (2024)
- [CoMA: Compositional Human Motion Generation with Multi-modal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07320/) (2024)
- [Pay Attention and Move Better: Harnessing Attention for Interactive Motion Generation and Training-free Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18977/) (2024)
- [EchoMask: Speech-Queried Attention-based Mask Modeling for Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09209/) (2025)
- [Dance Like a Chicken: Low-Rank Stylization for Human Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19557/) (2025)
- [SoPo: Text-to-Motion Generation Using Semi-Online Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05095/) (2024)
- [HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Motion Blending for Versatile Motion Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20724/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in text-to-motion generation using diffusion and autoregressive models have shown promising results. However, these models often suffer from a trade-off between real-time performance, high fidelity, and motion editability. To address this gap, we introduce MMM, a novel yet simple motion generation paradigm based on Masked Motion Model. MMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into a sequence of discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a conditional masked motion transformer that learns to predict randomly masked motion tokens, conditioned on the pre-computed text tokens. By attending to motion and text tokens in all directions, MMM explicitly captures inherent dependency among motion tokens and semantic mapping between motion and text tokens. During inference, this allows parallel and iterative decoding of multiple motion tokens that are highly consistent with fine-grained text descriptions, therefore simultaneously achieving high-fidelity and high-speed motion generation. In addition, MMM has innate motion editability. By simply placing mask tokens in the place that needs editing, MMM automatically fills the gaps while guaranteeing smooth transitions between editing and non-editing parts. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that MMM surpasses current leading methods in generating high-quality motion (evidenced by superior FID scores of 0.08 and 0.429), while offering advanced editing features such as body-part modification, motion in-betweening, and the synthesis of long motion sequences. In addition, MMM is two orders of magnitude faster on a single mid-range GPU than editable motion diffusion models. Our project page is available at urlhttps://exitudio.github.io/MMM-page.