# MotionLLM: Understanding Human Behaviors from Human Motions and Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 90 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (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)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 90)

- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Dispider: Enabling Video LLMs with Active Real-Time Interaction via Disentangled Perception, Decision, and Reaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03218/) (2025)
- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [MotionStreamer: Streaming Motion Generation via Diffusion-based Autoregressive Model in Causal Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15451/) (2025)
- [HumanOmni: A Large Vision-Speech Language Model for Human-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15111/) (2025)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)
- [SMooDi: Stylized Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12783/) (2024)
- [MotionGPT3: Human Motion as a Second Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24086/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16805/) (2024)
- [KinMo: Kinematic-aware Human Motion Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15472/) (2024)
- [M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18778/) (2025)
- [UniPose: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Human Pose Comprehension, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16781/) (2024)
- [Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24867/) (2025)
- [Ego4o: Egocentric Human Motion Capture and Understanding from Multi-Modal Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08449/) (2025)
- [Simulating the Real World: A Unified Survey of Multimodal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04641/) (2025)
- [HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/) (2025)
- [MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13790/) (2024)
- [Do Language Models Understand Time?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13845/) (2024)
- [ChatMotion: A Multimodal Multi-Agent for Human Motion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18180/) (2025)
- [Is this Generated Person Existed in Real-world? Fine-grained Detecting and Calibrating Abnormal Human-body](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14205/) (2024)
- [Motion-example-controlled Co-speech Gesture Generation Leveraging Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20220/) (2025)
- [Any2Caption:Interpreting Any Condition to Caption for Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24379/) (2025)
- [Being-M0.5: A Real-Time Controllable Vision-Language-Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07863/) (2025)
- [FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10909/) (2026)
- [AuroraLong: Bringing RNNs Back to Efficient Open-Ended Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02591/) (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)
- [ActionArt: Advancing Multimodal Large Models for Fine-Grained Human-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18152/) (2025)
- [HumanMM: Global Human Motion Recovery from Multi-shot Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07597/) (2025)
- [HIS-GPT: Towards 3D Human-In-Scene Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12955/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study delves into the realm of multi-modality (i.e., video and motion modalities) human behavior understanding by leveraging the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Diverging from recent LLMs designed for video-only or motion-only understanding, we argue that understanding human behavior necessitates joint modeling from both videos and motion sequences (e.g., SMPL sequences) to capture nuanced body part dynamics and semantics effectively. In light of this, we present MotionLLM, a straightforward yet effective framework for human motion understanding, captioning, and reasoning. Specifically, MotionLLM adopts a unified video-motion training strategy that leverages the complementary advantages of existing coarse video-text data and fine-grained motion-text data to glean rich spatial-temporal insights. Furthermore, we collect a substantial dataset, MoVid, comprising diverse videos, motions, captions, and instructions. Additionally, we propose the MoVid-Bench, with carefully manual annotations, for better evaluation of human behavior understanding on video and motion. Extensive experiments show the superiority of MotionLLM in the caption, spatial-temporal comprehension, and reasoning ability.