# Motion Mamba: Efficient and Long Sequence Motion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07487 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07487/

## Key facts

- Cited by 112 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video, motion and generative Mamba models, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 47 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Video, motion and generative Mamba models](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/video-motion-and-generative-mamba-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13985/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [On the Parameterization and Initialization of Diagonal State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11893/) (2022)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14343/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 112)

- [DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03601/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16575/) (2024)
- [ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13802/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04404/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Visual Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15956/) (2024)
- [Muon Outperforms Adam in Tail-End Associative Memory Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26030/) (2025)
- [Dual-path Mamba: Short and Long-term Bidirectional Selective Structured State Space Models for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18257/) (2024)
- [Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09646/) (2024)
- [Motion Anything: Any to Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06955/) (2025)
- [Visual Mamba: A Survey and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18861/) (2024)
- [MoGenTS: Motion Generation based on Spatial-Temporal Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17686/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01129/) (2024)
- [Unimotion: Unifying 3D Human Motion Synthesis and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15904/) (2024)
- [EnergyMoGen: Compositional Human Motion Generation with Energy-Based Diffusion Model in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14706/) (2024)
- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [InfiniMotion: Mamba Boosts Memory in Transformer for Arbitrary Long Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10061/) (2024)
- [Light-T2M: A Lightweight and Fast Model for Text-to-motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11193/) (2024)
- [Motion Avatar: Generate Human and Animal Avatars with Arbitrary Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11286/) (2024)
- [Sports-Traj: A Unified Trajectory Generation Model for Multi-Agent Movement in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17680/) (2024)
- [Mamba in Vision: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03105/) (2024)
- [QuadMamba: Learning Quadtree-based Selective Scan for Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06806/) (2024)
- [Trajectory Mamba: Efficient Attention-Mamba Forecasting Model Based on Selective SSM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10898/) (2025)
- [RGBT Tracking via All-layer Multimodal Interactions with Progressive Fusion Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08827/) (2024)
- [Text-controlled Motion Mamba: Text-Instructed Temporal Grounding of Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11375/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Mamba Architectures for Medical Image Analysis: Classification, Segmentation, Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02362/) (2024)
- [KMM: Key Frame Mask Mamba for Extended Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06481/) (2024)
- [SoPo: Text-to-Motion Generation Using Semi-Online Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05095/) (2024)
- [ViG: Linear-complexity Visual Sequence Learning with Gated Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18425/) (2024)
- [HARMamba: Efficient and Lightweight Wearable Sensor Human Activity Recognition Based on Bidirectional Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20183/) (2024)
- [InfiniDreamer: Arbitrarily Long Human Motion Generation via Segment Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18303/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human motion generation stands as a significant pursuit in generative computer vision, while achieving long-sequence and efficient motion generation remains challenging. Recent advancements in state space models (SSMs), notably Mamba, have showcased considerable promise in long sequence modeling with an efficient hardware-aware design, which appears to be a promising direction to build motion generation model upon it. Nevertheless, adapting SSMs to motion generation faces hurdles since the lack of a specialized design architecture to model motion sequence. To address these challenges, we propose Motion Mamba, a simple and efficient approach that presents the pioneering motion generation model utilized SSMs. Specifically, we design a Hierarchical Temporal Mamba (HTM) block to process temporal data by ensemble varying numbers of isolated SSM modules across a symmetric U-Net architecture aimed at preserving motion consistency between frames. We also design a Bidirectional Spatial Mamba (BSM) block to bidirectionally process latent poses, to enhance accurate motion generation within a temporal frame. Our proposed method achieves up to 50% FID improvement and up to 4 times faster on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets compared to the previous best diffusion-based method, which demonstrates strong capabilities of high-quality long sequence motion modeling and real-time human motion generation. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionMamba/