T2M-HiFiGPT: Generating High Quality Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Residual Discrete Representations

In this study, we introduce T2M-HiFiGPT, a novel conditional generative framework for synthesizing human motion from textual descriptions. This framework is underpinned by a Residual Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (RVQ-VAE) and a double-tier Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) architecture. We demonstrate that our CNN-based RVQ-VAE is capable of producing highly accurate 2D temporal-residual discrete motion representations. Our proposed double-tier GPT structure comprises a temporal GPT and a residual GPT. The temporal GPT efficiently condenses information from previous frames and textual descriptions into a 1D context vector. This vector then serves as a context prompt for the residual GPT, which generates the final residual discrete indices. These indices are subsequently transformed back into motion data by the RVQ-VAE decoder. To mitigate the exposure bias issue, we employ straightforward code corruption techniques for RVQ and a conditional dropout strategy, resulting in enhanced synthesis performance. Remarkably, T2M-HiFiGPT not only simplifies the generative process but also surpasses existing methods in both performance and parameter efficacy, including the latest diffusion-based and GPT-based models. On the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets, our framework achieves exceptional results across nearly all primary metrics. We further validate the efficacy of our framework through comprehensive ablation studies on the HumanML3D dataset, examining the contribution of each component. Our findings reveal that RVQ-VAE is more adept at capturing precise 3D human motion with comparable computational demand compared to its VQ-VAE counterparts. As a result, T2M-HiFiGPT enables the generation of human motion with significantly increased accuracy, outperforming recent state-of-the-art approaches such as T2M-GPT and Att-T2M.