# Programmable Motion Generation for Open-Set Motion Control Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19283 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19283/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [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)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [Robust Motion In-betweening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04942/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Deep Generative Prior for Versatile Image Restoration and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13659/) (2020)
- [Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12577/) (2023)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00541/) (2022)
- [IMos: Intent-Driven Full-Body Motion Synthesis for Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07555/) (2022)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)
- [Learning Motion Priors for 4D Human Body Capture in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10399/) (2021)
- [Towards Diverse and Natural Scene-aware 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13001/) (2022)
- [On Self-Contact and Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03176/) (2021)
- [CIRCLE: Capture In Rich Contextual Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17912/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20390/) (2025)
- [MaskControl: Spatio-Temporal Control for Masked Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10780/) (2024)
- [CoDA: Coordinated Diffusion Noise Optimization for Whole-Body Manipulation of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21437/) (2025)
- [Story3D-Agent: Exploring 3D Storytelling Visualization with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11801/) (2024)
- [Motion Synthesis with Sparse and Flexible Keyjoint Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15557/) (2025)
- [PINO: Person-Interaction Noise Optimization for Long-Duration and Customizable Motion Generation of Arbitrary-Sized Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19292/) (2025)
- [Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05419/) (2025)
- [Social Agent: Mastering Dyadic Nonverbal Behavior Generation via Conversational LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04637/) (2025)
- [ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22742/) (2026)
- [Recovering Complete Actions for Cross-dataset Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23641/) (2024)
- [Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08509/) (2026)
- [Retrieving and Refining Winning Noise Tickets for Diffusion-Based Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06843/) (2026)
- [Controllable Text-to-Motion Generation via Modular Body-Part Phase Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19795/) (2026)
- [Paper Reconstruction Evaluation: Evaluating Presentation and Hallucination in AI-written Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01128/) (2026)
- [Towards Highly-Constrained Human Motion Generation with Retrieval-Guided Diffusion Noise Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08054/) (2026)
- [Multi-scale Coarse-to-fine Modeling for Test-time Human Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14935/) (2026)
- [InterCMDM: Block-Causal Diffusion for Autoregressive Human Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01743/) (2026)
- [Training-free Controllable Human Motion Generation under Heterogeneous Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01990/) (2026)
- [InteractGesture: Progressive Chunk Guidance for Continuous Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25734/) (2026)
- [MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34190/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.