# Purposer: Putting Human Motion Generation in Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [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)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (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)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-based Generation, Optimization, and Planning in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06015/) (2023)
- [A Note on the Inception Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01973/) (2018)
- [GANs Trained by a Two Time-Scale Update Rule Converge to a Local Nash Equilibrium](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08500/) (2017)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08386/) (2020)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)
- [HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09561/) (2017)
- [TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04066/) (2022)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)
- [HUMANISE: Language-conditioned Human Motion Generation in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09729/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Survey on Human Interaction Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12763/) (2025)
- [3D Human Interaction Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13120/) (2025)
- [Moving by Looking: Towards Vision-Driven Avatar Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19259/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel method to generate human motion to populate 3D indoor scenes. It can be controlled with various combinations of conditioning signals such as a path in a scene, target poses, past motions, and scenes represented as 3D point clouds. State-of-the-art methods are either models specialized to one single setting, require vast amounts of high-quality and diverse training data, or are unconditional models that do not integrate scene or other contextual information. As a consequence, they have limited applicability and rely on costly training data. To address these limitations, we propose a new method ,dubbed Purposer, based on neural discrete representation learning. Our model is capable of exploiting, in a flexible manner, different types of information already present in open access large-scale datasets such as AMASS. First, we encode unconditional human motion into a discrete latent space. Second, an autoregressive generative model, conditioned with key contextual information, either with prompting or additive tokens, and trained for next-step prediction in this space, synthesizes sequences of latent indices. We further design a novel conditioning block to handle future conditioning information in such a causal model by using a network with two branches to compute separate stacks of features. In this manner, Purposer can generate realistic motion sequences in diverse test scenes. Through exhaustive evaluation, we demonstrate that our multi-contextual solution outperforms existing specialized approaches for specific contextual information, both in terms of quality and diversity. Our model is trained with short sequences, but a byproduct of being able to use various conditioning signals is that at test time different combinations can be used to chain short sequences together and generate long motions within a context scene.