# Pay Attention and Move Better: Harnessing Attention for Interactive Motion Generation and Training-free Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18977/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 103 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 103)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14913/) (2020)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08696/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (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)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (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)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15679/) (2021)
- [ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01116/) (2023)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20390/) (2025)
- [Go to Zero: Towards Zero-shot Motion Generation with Million-scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07095/) (2025)
- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [Simulating the Real World: A Unified Survey of Multimodal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04641/) (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)
- [MotionWavelet: Human Motion Prediction via Wavelet Manifold Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16964/) (2024)
- [EgoReAct: Egocentric Video-Driven 3D Human Reaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22808/) (2025)
- [UMO: Unified In-Context Learning Unlocks Motion Foundation Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15975/) (2026)
- [Riemannian Motion Generation: A Unified Framework for Human Motion Representation and Generation via Riemannian Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15016/) (2026)
- [FlowCoMotion: Text-to-Motion Generation via Token-Latent Flow Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11083/) (2026)
- [A Unified Conditional Flow for Motion Generation, Editing, and Intra-Structural Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13427/) (2026)
- [MoSAT: Human Motion Generation from Spatial Audio and Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23797/) (2026)
- [PMG: Progressive Motion Generation via Sparse Anchor Postures Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16722/) (2025)
- [Training-free Controllable Human Motion Generation under Heterogeneous Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01990/) (2026)
- [Motion4Motion: Motion Transfer Across Subjects at Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11644/) (2026)
- [UniMoFlow: Grounding Instruction-Driven 3D Human Motion Editing in Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09143/) (2026)
- [Flexible Motion Generation from Language and Style References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08032/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This research delves into the problem of interactive editing of human motion generation. Previous motion diffusion models lack explicit modeling of the word-level text-motion correspondence and good explainability, hence restricting their fine-grained editing ability. To address this issue, we propose an attention-based motion diffusion model, namely MotionCLR, with CLeaR modeling of attention mechanisms. Technically, MotionCLR models the in-modality and cross-modality interactions with self-attention and cross-attention, respectively. More specifically, the self-attention mechanism aims to measure the sequential similarity between frames and impacts the order of motion features. By contrast, the cross-attention mechanism works to find the fine-grained word-sequence correspondence and activate the corresponding timesteps in the motion sequence. Based on these key properties, we develop a versatile set of simple yet effective motion editing methods via manipulating attention maps, such as motion (de-)emphasizing, in-place motion replacement, and example-based motion generation, etc. For further verification of the explainability of the attention mechanism, we additionally explore the potential of action-counting and grounded motion generation ability via attention maps. Our experimental results show that our method enjoys good generation and editing ability with good explainability.