# MotionScript: Natural Language Descriptions for Expressive 3D Human Motions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12634/

## 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 (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (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)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08386/) (2020)
- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02610/) (2022)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)
- [BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05297/) (2022)
- [TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04066/) (2022)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [EVA3D: Compositional 3D Human Generation from 2D Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04888/) (2022)
- [Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04095/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19652/) (2024)
- [ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10232/) (2024)
- [MG-MotionLLM: A Unified Framework for Motion Comprehension and Generation across Multiple Granularities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02478/) (2025)
- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03883/) (2025)
- [MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13790/) (2024)
- [FineMotion: A Dataset and Benchmark with both Spatial and Temporal Annotation for Fine-grained Motion Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19850/) (2025)
- [FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10909/) (2026)
- [IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10730/) (2025)
- [CrowdMoGen: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Collective Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06188/) (2024)
- [OmniMotion-X: Versatile Multimodal Whole-Body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19789/) (2025)
- [COLLAGE: Collaborative Human-Agent Interaction Generation using Hierarchical Latent Diffusion and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20502/) (2024)
- [HandX: Scaling Bimanual Motion and Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28766/) (2026)
- [HumanMoveVQA: Can Video MLLMs reason about human movement in videos?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27999/) (2026)
- [ShotVL: Human-Centric Highlight Frame Retrieval via Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12675/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Generative AI with Autoregressive LLMs for Human Motion Understanding and Generation: A Way Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03191/) (2025)
- [From Motion to Behavior: Hierarchical Modeling of Humanoid Generative Behavior Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00043/) (2025)
- [MotionMERGE: A Multi-granular Framework for Human Motion Editing, Reasoning, Generation, and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18956/) (2026)
- [SalsaAgent: A multimodal embodied language model for interactive dance generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29219/) (2026)

## 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.