# MotionGPT-2: A General-Purpose Motion-Language Model for Motion Generation and Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [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)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)
- [Motion Anything: Any to Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06955/) (2025)
- [MotionGPT3: Human Motion as a Second Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24086/) (2025)
- [HOIGPT: Learning Long Sequence Hand-Object Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19157/) (2025)
- [MotionLab: Unified Human Motion Generation and Editing via the Motion-Condition-Motion Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02358/) (2025)
- [PresentAgent: Multimodal Agent for Presentation Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04036/) (2025)
- [DisCoRD: Discrete Tokens to Continuous Motion via Rectified Flow Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19527/) (2024)
- [TextOp: Real-time Interactive Text-Driven Humanoid Robot Motion Generation and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07439/) (2026)
- [Human-Centric Foundation Models: Perception, Generation and Agentic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08556/) (2025)
- [RL from Physical Feedback: Aligning Large Motion Models with Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12769/) (2025)
- [LLaMo: Scaling Pretrained Language Models for Unified Motion Understanding and Generation with Continuous Autoregressive Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12370/) (2026)
- [Being-M0.5: A Real-Time Controllable Vision-Language-Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07863/) (2025)
- [AToM: Aligning Text-to-Motion Model at Event-Level with GPT-4Vision Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18654/) (2024)
- [GenM3: Generative Pretrained Multi-path Motion Model for Text Conditional Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14919/) (2025)
- [IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10730/) (2025)
- [ViBES: A Conversational Agent with Behaviorally-Intelligent 3D Virtual Body](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14234/) (2025)
- [Heracles: Bridging Precise Tracking and Generative Synthesis for General Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27756/) (2026)
- [SCRIPT: Scalable Diffusion Policy with Multi-stage Training for Language-driven Physics-Based Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22894/) (2026)
- [Mojito: LLM-Aided Motion Instructor with Jitter-Reduced Inertial Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16175/) (2025)
- [X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05162/) (2025)
- [VimoRAG: Video-based Retrieval-augmented 3D Motion Generation for Motion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12081/) (2025)
- [CoachMe: Decoding Sport Elements with a Reference-Based Coaching Instruction Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11698/) (2025)
- [HMVLM: Human Motion-Vision-Lanuage Model via MoE LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01463/) (2025)
- [Bridging Semantic and Kinematic Conditions with Diffusion-based Discrete Motion Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19227/) (2026)
- [Next-Scale Autoregressive Models for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03799/) (2026)
- [MTVCraft: Tokenizing 4D Motion for Arbitrary Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10238/) (2025)
- [Dense Motion Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05369/) (2025)
- [UniMo: Unified Motion Generation and Understanding with Chain of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12126/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Streaming Human Motion Generation with Per-Joint Latent Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08590/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating lifelike human motions from descriptive texts has experienced remarkable research focus in the recent years, propelled by the emerging requirements of digital humans.Despite impressive advances, existing approaches are often constrained by limited control modalities, task specificity, and focus solely on body motion representations.In this paper, we present MotionGPT-2, a unified Large Motion-Language Model (LMLM) that addresses these limitations. MotionGPT-2 accommodates multiple motion-relevant tasks and supporting multimodal control conditions through pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs). It quantizes multimodal inputs-such as text and single-frame poses-into discrete, LLM-interpretable tokens, seamlessly integrating them into the LLM's vocabulary. These tokens are then organized into unified prompts, guiding the LLM to generate motion outputs through a pretraining-then-finetuning paradigm. We also show that the proposed MotionGPT-2 is highly adaptable to the challenging 3D holistic motion generation task, enabled by the innovative motion discretization framework, Part-Aware VQVAE, which ensures fine-grained representations of body and hand movements. Extensive experiments and visualizations validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating the adaptability of MotionGPT-2 across motion generation, motion captioning, and generalized motion completion tasks.