MotionScript: Natural Language Descriptions for Expressive 3D Human Motions
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce MotionScript, a novel framework for generating highly detailed, natural language descriptions of 3D human motions. Unlike existing motion datasets that rely on broad action labels or generic captions, MotionScript provides fine-grained, structured descriptions that capture the full complexity of human movement including expressive actions (e.g., emotions, stylistic walking) and interactions beyond standard motion capture datasets. MotionScript serves as both a descriptive tool and a training resource for text-to-motion models, enabling the synthesis of highly realistic and diverse human motions from text. By augmenting motion datasets with MotionScript captions, we demonstrate significant improvements in out-of-distribution motion generation, allowing large language models (LLMs) to generate motions that extend beyond existing data. Additionally, MotionScript opens new applications in animation, virtual human simulation, and robotics, providing an interpretable bridge between intuitive descriptions and motion synthesis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to systematically translate 3D motion into structured natural language without requiring training data.
Key facts. Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 53 of its 71 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2023.
Builds on
53 of 71 references.
References · 53
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
- 2019AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapescited by 1,236
- 2022Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 1,080
- 2022MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Modelcited by 780
- 2023T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representationscited by 588
- 2022Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Spacecited by 575
- 2021Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAEcited by 501
- 2022TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptionscited by 492
- 2021AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++cited by 485
- 2020Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motionscited by 441
- 2022PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 368
- 2022TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Textscited by 359
38 more
- 2016The KIT Motion-Language Datasetcited by 338
- 2022EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Musiccited by 287
- 2023ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 287
- 2021BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labelscited by 265
- 2019Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecastingcited by 257
- 2022MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesiscited by 218
- 2022FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editingcited by 217
- 2022Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Modelscited by 190
- 2020DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Predictioncited by 185
- 2023InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusioncited by 182
- 2022Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Togethercited by 181
- 2021Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptionscited by 178
- 2022BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesiscited by 178
- 2022TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humanscited by 176
- 2023GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latentscited by 158
- 2023Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generationcited by 129
- 2022EVA3D: Compositional 3D Human Generation from 2D Image Collectionscited by 111
- 2018Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimationcited by 107
- 2023DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 85
- 2022ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speechcited by 84
- 2023Fg-T2M: Fine-Grained Text-Driven Human Motion Generation via Diffusion Modelcited by 79
- 2022PoseGPT: Quantization-based 3D Human Motion Generation and Forecastingcited by 78
- 2022ActFormer: A GAN-based Transformer towards General Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Generationcited by 77
- 2022UDE: A Unified Driving Engine for Human Motion Generationcited by 67
- 2023SINC: Spatial Composition of 3D Human Motions for Simultaneous Action Generationcited by 64
- 2023Make-An-Animation: Large-Scale Text-conditional 3D Human Motion Generationcited by 56
- 2023Text2Performer: Text-Driven Human Video Generationcited by 53
- 2022Spatio-Temporal Gating-Adjacency GCN for Human Motion Predictioncited by 48
- 2022Generative Action Description Prompts for Skeleton-based Action Recognitioncited by 43
- 2021Towards Robust and Adaptive Motion Forecasting: A Causal Representation Perspectivecited by 40
- 2023AMD: Autoregressive Motion Diffusioncited by 30
- 2022Action-GPT: Leveraging Large-scale Language Models for Improved and Generalized Action Generationcited by 28
- 2023The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settingscited by 28
- 2023Diffusion-Based Co-Speech Gesture Generation Using Joint Text and Audio Representationcited by 28
- 2022GANimator: Neural Motion Synthesis from a Single Sequencecited by 23
- 2023UnifiedGesture: A Unified Gesture Synthesis Model for Multiple Skeletonscited by 15
- 2021Hierarchical Motion Understanding via Motion Programscited by 14
- 2021FixMyPose: Pose Correctional Captioning and Retrievalcited by 12
50 most cited of 53 All 53 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 8; 2025: 8; 2026: 5.
21 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2024Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregressioncited by 85
- 2024Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generationcited by 65
- 2024InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interactioncited by 64
- 2024ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactionscited by 57
- 2025MG-MotionLLM: A Unified Framework for Motion Comprehension and Generation across Multiple Granularitiescited by 30
- 2025Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easycited by 29
- 2025Human Motion Video Generation: A Surveycited by 25
- 2024MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotationscited by 14
- 2025FineMotion: A Dataset and Benchmark with both Spatial and Temporal Annotation for Fine-grained Motion Generation and Editingcited by 11
- 2026FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Compositioncited by 10
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 6
- 2024CrowdMoGen: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Collective Motion Generationcited by 4
9 more
- 2025OmniMotion-X: Versatile Multimodal Whole-Body Motion Generationcited by 4
- 2024COLLAGE: Collaborative Human-Agent Interaction Generation using Hierarchical Latent Diffusion and Language Modelscited by 3
- 2026HandX: Scaling Bimanual Motion and Interaction Generationcited by 2
- 2026HumanMoveVQA: Can Video MLLMs reason about human movement in videos?cited by 2
- 2024ShotVL: Human-Centric Highlight Frame Retrieval via Language Queriescited by 1
- 2025Multimodal Generative AI with Autoregressive LLMs for Human Motion Understanding and Generation: A Way Forwardcited by 1
- 2025From Motion to Behavior: Hierarchical Modeling of Humanoid Generative Behavior Controlcited by 0
- 2026MotionMERGE: A Multi-granular Framework for Human Motion Editing, Reasoning, Generation, and Explanationcited by 0
- 2026SalsaAgent: A multimodal embodied language model for interactive dance generationcited by 0
- 2026HumanMoveVQA: Can Video MLLMs reason about human movement in videos?26 Jun 2026
- 2026SalsaAgent: A multimodal embodied language model for interactive dance generation28 May 2026
- 2026MotionMERGE: A Multi-granular Framework for Human Motion Editing, Reasoning, Generation, and Explanation18 May 2026
- 2026HandX: Scaling Bimanual Motion and Interaction Generation30 Mar 2026
- 2026FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition15 Jan 2026
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation11 Dec 2025
- 2025OmniMotion-X: Versatile Multimodal Whole-Body Motion Generation22 Oct 2025
- 2025Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey4 Sep 2025
- 2025FineMotion: A Dataset and Benchmark with both Spatial and Temporal Annotation for Fine-grained Motion Generation and Editing26 Jul 2025
- 2025Multimodal Generative AI with Autoregressive LLMs for Human Motion Understanding and Generation: A Way Forward31 May 2025
- 2025From Motion to Behavior: Hierarchical Modeling of Humanoid Generative Behavior Control28 May 2025
- 2025Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy26 May 2025
9 more
- 2025MG-MotionLLM: A Unified Framework for Motion Comprehension and Generation across Multiple Granularities3 Apr 2025
- 2024ShotVL: Human-Centric Highlight Frame Retrieval via Language Queries17 Dec 2024
- 2024Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregression25 Nov 2024
- 2024MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotations17 Oct 2024
- 2024COLLAGE: Collaborative Human-Agent Interaction Generation using Hierarchical Latent Diffusion and Language Models30 Sep 2024
- 2024CrowdMoGen: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Collective Motion Generation8 Jul 2024
- 2024Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation1 Apr 2024
- 2024InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction28 Mar 2024
- 2024ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions18 Jan 2024
- 2024Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregressioncited by 85
- 2024Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generationcited by 65
- 2024ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactionscited by 57
- 2025MG-MotionLLM: A Unified Framework for Motion Comprehension and Generation across Multiple Granularitiescited by 30
- 2025Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easycited by 29
- 2025Human Motion Video Generation: A Surveycited by 25
- 2024MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotationscited by 14
- 2025FineMotion: A Dataset and Benchmark with both Spatial and Temporal Annotation for Fine-grained Motion Generation and Editingcited by 11
- 2026FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Compositioncited by 10
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 6
- 2024CrowdMoGen: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Collective Motion Generationcited by 4
- 2026HandX: Scaling Bimanual Motion and Interaction Generationcited by 2
12 most cited of 16 All 16 (JSON)
- 2026SalsaAgent: A multimodal embodied language model for interactive dance generation28 May 2026
- 2026HandX: Scaling Bimanual Motion and Interaction Generation30 Mar 2026
- 2026FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition15 Jan 2026
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation11 Dec 2025
- 2025Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey4 Sep 2025
- 2025FineMotion: A Dataset and Benchmark with both Spatial and Temporal Annotation for Fine-grained Motion Generation and Editing26 Jul 2025
- 2025Multimodal Generative AI with Autoregressive LLMs for Human Motion Understanding and Generation: A Way Forward31 May 2025
- 2025From Motion to Behavior: Hierarchical Modeling of Humanoid Generative Behavior Control28 May 2025
- 2025Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy26 May 2025
- 2025MG-MotionLLM: A Unified Framework for Motion Comprehension and Generation across Multiple Granularities3 Apr 2025
- 2024ShotVL: Human-Centric Highlight Frame Retrieval via Language Queries17 Dec 2024
- 2024Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregression25 Nov 2024
12 newest of 16 All 16 (JSON)