# MotionChain: Conversational Motion Controllers via Multimodal Prompts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01700/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 86 of its 120 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 86)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)

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

- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [Motion-Agent: A Conversational Framework for Human Motion Generation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17013/) (2024)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)
- [MotionLab: Unified Human Motion Generation and Editing via the Motion-Condition-Motion Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02358/) (2025)
- [CoMA: Compositional Human Motion Generation with Multi-modal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07320/) (2024)
- [HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/) (2025)
- [SocialGen: Modeling Multi-Human Social Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22906/) (2025)
- [LLaMo: Scaling Pretrained Language Models for Unified Motion Understanding and Generation with Continuous Autoregressive Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12370/) (2026)
- [Being-M0.5: A Real-Time Controllable Vision-Language-Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07863/) (2025)
- [Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05419/) (2025)
- [GenM3: Generative Pretrained Multi-path Motion Model for Text Conditional Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14919/) (2025)
- [DanceEditor: Towards Iterative Editable Music-driven Dance Generation with Open-Vocabulary Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17342/) (2025)
- [IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10730/) (2025)
- [A Unified Framework for Motion Reasoning and Generation in Human Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05628/) (2024)
- [Mojito: LLM-Aided Motion Instructor with Jitter-Reduced Inertial Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16175/) (2025)
- [SMooGPT: Stylized Motion Generation using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04058/) (2025)
- [HMVLM: Human Motion-Vision-Lanuage Model via MoE LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01463/) (2025)
- [CoordSpeaker: Exploiting Gesture Captioning for Coordinated Caption-Empowered Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22863/) (2025)
- [ACMo: Attribute Controllable Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11038/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Generative AI with Autoregressive LLMs for Human Motion Understanding and Generation: A Way Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03191/) (2025)
- [OmniMoGen: Unifying Human Motion Generation via Learning from Interleaved Text-Motion Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19159/) (2025)
- [CLUTCH: Contextualized Language model for Unlocking Text-Conditioned Hand motion modelling in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17770/) (2026)
- [Beyond MoCap: Scaling Motion Tokenizers with Synthetic Human Motion for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27547/) (2026)
- [BiomechGPT: Extending Motion-Language Models to Clinical Motion Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18465/) (2025)
- [MoGIC: Boosting Motion Generation via Intention Understanding and Visual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02722/) (2025)
- [MoRL: Reinforced Reasoning for Unified Motion Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14534/) (2026)
- [MotionMERGE: A Multi-granular Framework for Human Motion Editing, Reasoning, Generation, and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18956/) (2026)
- [PhotoHOI: Synthesizing 3D Hand-Object Interactions from a Single RGB Photograph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01905/) (2026)
- [Open-UniMo: Towards Unified Motion-Language Understanding and Generation in the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14615/) (2026)
- [SignGPT: Toward LLM-Mediated Sign Language Interaction through Gloss-Free Translation and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21709/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated their adeptness in conducting multi-turn dialogues and retaining conversational context. However, this proficiency remains largely unexplored in other multimodal generative models, particularly in human motion models. By integrating multi-turn conversations in controlling continuous virtual human movements, generative human motion models can achieve an intuitive and step-by-step process of human task execution for humanoid robotics, game agents, or other embodied systems. In this work, we present MotionChain, a conversational human motion controller to generate continuous and long-term human motion through multimodal prompts. Specifically, MotionChain consists of multi-modal tokenizers that transform various data types such as text, image, and motion, into discrete tokens, coupled with a Vision-Motion-aware Language model. By leveraging large-scale language, vision-language, and vision-motion data to assist motion-related generation tasks, MotionChain thus comprehends each instruction in multi-turn conversation and generates human motions followed by these prompts. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of MotionChain, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in conversational motion generation, as well as more intuitive manners of controlling and interacting with virtual humans.