# BAMM: Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [MotionStreamer: Streaming Motion Generation via Diffusion-based Autoregressive Model in Causal Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15451/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16575/) (2024)
- [Motion Anything: Any to Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06955/) (2025)
- [MaskControl: Spatio-Temporal Control for Masked Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10780/) (2024)
- [SMooDi: Stylized Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12783/) (2024)
- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [ChainHOI: Joint-based Kinematic Chain Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13130/) (2025)
- [DisCoRD: Discrete Tokens to Continuous Motion via Rectified Flow Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19527/) (2024)
- [CoMA: Compositional Human Motion Generation with Multi-modal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07320/) (2024)
- [EchoMask: Speech-Queried Attention-based Mask Modeling for Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09209/) (2025)
- [HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/) (2025)
- [BAD: Bidirectional Auto-regressive Diffusion for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10847/) (2024)
- [MoLA: Motion Generation and Editing with Latent Diffusion Enhanced by Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01867/) (2024)
- [Progressive Human Motion Generation Based on Text and Few Motion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13300/) (2025)
- [Text-driven Motion Generation: Overview, Challenges and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09379/) (2025)
- [StyleMotif: Multi-Modal Motion Stylization using Style-Content Cross Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21775/) (2025)
- [MoDiPO: text-to-motion alignment via AI-feedback-driven Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03803/) (2024)
- [BiPO: Bidirectional Partial Occlusion Network for Text-to-Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00112/) (2024)
- [IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10730/) (2025)
- [SafeMo: Linguistically Grounded Unlearning for Trustworthy Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00590/) (2026)
- [MoSa: Motion Generation with Scalable Autoregressive Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01200/) (2025)
- [Temporal Consistency-Aware Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18057/) (2026)
- [ActionPlan: Future-Aware Streaming Motion Synthesis via Frame-Level Action Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13500/) (2026)
- [LiveGesture Streamable Co-Speech Gesture Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10927/) (2026)
- [Dyadic Mamba: Long-term Dyadic Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09827/) (2025)
- [BiMotion: B-spline Motion for Text-guided Dynamic 3D Character Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18873/) (2026)
- [SentiAvatar: Towards Expressive and Interactive Digital Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02908/) (2026)
- [Next-Scale Autoregressive Models for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03799/) (2026)
- [MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23264/) (2026)
- [ScaleMoGen: Autoregressive Next-Scale Prediction for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11704/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating human motion from text has been dominated by denoising motion models either through diffusion or generative masking process. However, these models face great limitations in usability by requiring prior knowledge of the motion length. Conversely, autoregressive motion models address this limitation by adaptively predicting motion endpoints, at the cost of degraded generation quality and editing capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model (BAMM), a novel text-to-motion generation framework. BAMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a masked self-attention transformer that autoregressively predicts randomly masked tokens via a hybrid attention masking strategy. By unifying generative masked modeling and autoregressive modeling, BAMM captures rich and bidirectional dependencies among motion tokens, while learning the probabilistic mapping from textual inputs to motion outputs with dynamically-adjusted motion sequence length. This feature enables BAMM to simultaneously achieving high-quality motion generation with enhanced usability and built-in motion editability. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that BAMM surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measures. Our project page is available at https://exitudio.github.io/BAMM-page