# Decoupling Contact for Fine-Grained Motion Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05387 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05387/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [Character Controllers Using Motion VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14274/) (2021)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [Text2Action: Generative Adversarial Synthesis from Language to Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05298/) (2017)
- [Unpaired Motion Style Transfer from Video to Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05751/) (2020)
- [ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07556/) (2022)
- [Augmented CycleGAN: Learning Many-to-Many Mappings from Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10151/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Style Modelling of Human Locomotion via Feature-Wise Transformations and Local Motion Phases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04439/) (2022)
- [Motion Puzzle: Arbitrary Motion Style Transfer by Body Part](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05274/) (2022)
- [Action-Agnostic Human Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09676/) (2018)
- [Spatio-temporal Manifold Learning for Human Motions via Long-horizon Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07214/) (2019)
- [Real-time Controllable Motion Transition for Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02540/) (2022)
- [RSMT: Real-time Stylized Motion Transition for Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11970/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Future Net: Diversified Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05109/) (2020)
- [MOCHA: Real-Time Motion Characterization via Context Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10079/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Dance Like a Chicken: Low-Rank Stylization for Human Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19557/) (2025)
- [VQ-Style: Disentangling Style and Content in Motion with Residual Quantized Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02334/) (2026)
- [STyMo: Fast and Controllable Few-Shot Motion Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04500/) (2026)
- [Flexible Motion Generation from Language and Style References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08032/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Motion style transfer changes the style of a motion while retaining its content and is useful in computer animations and games. Contact is an essential component of motion style transfer that should be controlled explicitly in order to express the style vividly while enhancing motion naturalness and quality. However, it is unknown how to decouple and control contact to achieve fine-grained control in motion style transfer. In this paper, we present a novel style transfer method for fine-grained control over contacts while achieving both motion naturalness and spatial-temporal variations of style. Based on our empirical evidence, we propose controlling contact indirectly through the hip velocity, which can be further decomposed into the trajectory and contact timing, respectively. To this end, we propose a new model that explicitly models the correlations between motions and trajectory/contact timing/style, allowing us to decouple and control each separately. Our approach is built around a motion manifold, where hip controls can be easily integrated into a Transformer-based decoder. It is versatile in that it can generate motions directly as well as be used as post-processing for existing methods to improve quality and contact controllability. In addition, we propose a new metric that measures a correlation pattern of motions based on our empirical evidence, aligning well with human perception in terms of motion naturalness. Based on extensive evaluation, our method outperforms existing methods in terms of style expressivity and motion quality.