# MaskedMimic: Unified Physics-Based Character Control Through Masked Motion Inpainting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14393 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14393/

## Key facts

- Cited by 116 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02438/) (2015)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06456/) (2023)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [DeepMimic: Example-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning of Physics-Based Character Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02717/) (2018)
- [Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01893/) (2023)
- [Universal Humanoid Motion Representations for Physics-Based Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04582/) (2023)
- [Avatars Grow Legs: Generating Smooth Human Motion from Sparse Tracking Inputs with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08577/) (2023)
- [Synthesizing Physical Character-Scene Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00883/) (2023)
- [Dynamics-Regulated Kinematic Policy for Egocentric Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05969/) (2021)
- [CALM: Conditional Adversarial Latent Models for Directable Virtual Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02195/) (2023)
- [Unified Human-Scene Interaction via Prompted Chain-of-Contacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07918/) (2023)
- [Towards Diverse and Natural Scene-aware 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13001/) (2022)
- [QuestSim: Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Sensors with Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09391/) (2022)
- [PhysHOI: Physics-Based Imitation of Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04393/) (2023)
- [ProSpect: Prompt Spectrum for Attribute-Aware Personalization of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16225/) (2023)
- [Scene-aware Generative Network for Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14804/) (2021)
- [Residual Force Control for Agile Human Behavior Imitation and Extended Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07364/) (2020)
- [C·ASE: Learning Conditional Adversarial Skill Embeddings for Physics-based Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11351/) (2023)
- [PADL: Language-Directed Physics-Based Character Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13868/) (2023)
- [Deep Inertial Poser: Learning to Reconstruct Human Pose from Sparse Inertial Measurements in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04703/) (2018)
- [LoBSTr: Real-time Lower-body Pose Prediction from Sparse Upper-body Tracking Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01500/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 116)

- [BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08241/) (2025)
- [ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01143/) (2025)
- [CLoSD: Closing the Loop between Simulation and Diffusion for multi-task character control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03441/) (2024)
- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)
- [Flow Matching Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21053/) (2025)
- [ExBody2: Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13196/) (2024)
- [InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20390/) (2025)
- [Visual Imitation Enables Contextual Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03729/) (2025)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [KungfuBot: Physics-Based Humanoid Whole-Body Control for Learning Highly-Dynamic Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12851/) (2025)
- [TokenHSI: Unified Synthesis of Physical Human-Scene Interactions through Task Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19901/) (2025)
- [LeVERB: Humanoid Whole-Body Control with Latent Vision-Language Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13751/) (2025)
- [MaskControl: Spatio-Temporal Control for Masked Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10780/) (2024)
- [Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15546/) (2026)
- [InterAct: Advancing Large-Scale Versatile 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09555/) (2025)
- [Causal-JEPA: Learning World Models through Object-Level Latent Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11389/) (2026)
- [Learning Getting-Up Policies for Real-World Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12152/) (2025)
- [UniPhys: Unified Planner and Controller with Diffusion for Flexible Physics-Based Character Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12540/) (2025)
- [SkillMimic-V2: Learning Robust and Generalizable Interaction Skills from Sparse and Noisy Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02094/) (2025)
- [Pay Attention and Move Better: Harnessing Attention for Interactive Motion Generation and Training-free Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18977/) (2024)
- [Mimicking-Bench: A Benchmark for Generalizable Humanoid-Scene Interaction Learning via Human Mimicking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17730/) (2024)
- [SocialGen: Modeling Multi-Human Social Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22906/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing 4D Spatial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21045/) (2025)
- [KungfuBot2: Learning Versatile Motion Skills for Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16638/) (2025)
- [SIMS: Simulating Stylized Human-Scene Interactions with Retrieval-Augmented Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19921/) (2024)
- [Human-Object Interaction via Automatically Designed VLM-Guided Motion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18349/) (2025)
- [Physics-Based Motion Imitation with Adversarial Differential Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04961/) (2025)
- [CoDA: Coordinated Diffusion Noise Optimization for Whole-Body Manipulation of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21437/) (2025)
- [MOSPA: Human Motion Generation Driven by Spatial Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11949/) (2025)
- [Dexplore: Scalable Neural Control for Dexterous Manipulation from Reference-Scoped Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09671/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse control modalities, such as sparse target keyframes, text instructions, and scene information. While previous works have proposed physically simulated, scene-aware control models, these systems have predominantly focused on developing controllers that each specializes in a narrow set of tasks and control modalities. This work presents MaskedMimic, a novel approach that formulates physics-based character control as a general motion inpainting problem. Our key insight is to train a single unified model to synthesize motions from partial (masked) motion descriptions, such as masked keyframes, objects, text descriptions, or any combination thereof. This is achieved by leveraging motion tracking data and designing a scalable training method that can effectively utilize diverse motion descriptions to produce coherent animations. Through this process, our approach learns a physics-based controller that provides an intuitive control interface without requiring tedious reward engineering for all behaviors of interest. The resulting controller supports a wide range of control modalities and enables seamless transitions between disparate tasks. By unifying character control through motion inpainting, MaskedMimic creates versatile virtual characters. These characters can dynamically adapt to complex scenes and compose diverse motions on demand, enabling more interactive and immersive experiences.