AdvMT: Adversarial Motion Transformer for Long-term Human Motion Prediction

Human motion prediction is a crucial capability for advanced robotic systems that interact with humans. In facilities with dynamic human-robot collaboration settings, robots must anticipate human movements to ensure safety, prevent collisions, and optimize cooperative tasks. Traditionally, motion forecasting is treated as a sequential modeling problem using historical pose data, but achieving long-term accuracy and physical realism remains challenging. We present Adversarial Motion Transformer (AdvMT), a novel approach that integrates a Transformer-based motion encoder with a temporal continuity discriminator to address these challenges. The Transformer captures rich spatio-temporal dependencies across human joints, while adversarial training with a continuity discriminator enforces smooth, natural motion trajectories that adhere to biomechanical constraints. Our training scheme includes a bone-length consistency term and adversarial loss to reduce common artifacts like pose freezing or unnatural transitions. In experiments on the Human3.6M motion dataset, AdvMT achieves state-of-the-art long-horizon prediction accuracy while also delivering robust short-term predictions. These improvements strengthen the prediction foundation for physical AI in manufacturing and human-robot collaboration, where anticipating human motion is a prerequisite for safe and efficient robot coordination.