mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AnyTop: Character Animation Diffusion with Any Topology

arXiv 2502.17327 ↗First posted 24 Feb 2025cs.GR cs.AI cs.CVcited by 41

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Abstract (arXiv)

Generating motion for arbitrary skeletons is a longstanding challenge in computer graphics, remaining largely unexplored due to the scarcity of diverse datasets and the irregular nature of the data. In this work, we introduce AnyTop, a diffusion model that generates motions for diverse characters with distinct motion dynamics, using only their skeletal structure as input. Our work features a transformer-based denoising network, tailored for arbitrary skeleton learning, integrating topology information into the traditional attention mechanism. Additionally, by incorporating textual joint descriptions into the latent feature representation, AnyTop learns semantic correspondences between joints across diverse skeletons. Our evaluation demonstrates that AnyTop generalizes well, even with as few as three training examples per topology, and can produce motions for unseen skeletons as well. Furthermore, our model's latent space is highly informative, enabling downstream tasks such as joint correspondence, temporal segmentation and motion editing. Our webpage, https://anytop2025.github.io/Anytop-page, includes links to videos and code.

Key facts. Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2025.

Builds on

36 of 63 references.

References · 36

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  3. 2016Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 11,361
  4. 2017Graph Attention Networkscited by 8,923
  5. 2018On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networkscited by 1,214
  6. 2018Self-Attention with Relative Position Representationscited by 1,120
  7. 2022Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 1,080
  8. 2022MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Modelcited by 780
  9. 2020A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphscited by 661
  10. 2021Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAEcited by 501
  11. 2022TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptionscited by 492
  12. 2021Rethinking Graph Transformers with Spectral Attentioncited by 473
24 more
  1. 2023MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motionscited by 400
  2. 2023Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Priorcited by 357
  3. 20163D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animalscited by 312
  4. 2023OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generationcited by 238
  5. 2023Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesiscited by 223
  6. 2020Skeleton-Aware Networks for Deep Motion Retargetingcited by 124
  7. 2024CLoSD: Closing the Loop between Simulation and Diffusion for multi-task character controlcited by 109
  8. 2023Telling Left from Right: Identifying Geometry-Aware Semantic Correspondencecited by 86
  9. 2022GRPE: Relative Positional Encoding for Graph Transformercited by 70
  10. 2023Single Motion Diffusioncited by 65
  11. 2016Deep Learning on Lie Groups for Skeleton-based Action Recognitioncited by 42
  12. 2023MAS: Multi-view Ancestral Sampling for 3D motion generation using 2D diffusioncited by 37
  13. 2023Skinned Motion Retargeting with Residual Perception of Motion Semantics & Geometrycited by 35
  14. 2021Contact-Aware Retargeting of Skinned Motioncited by 32
  15. 2023AMD: Autoregressive Motion Diffusioncited by 30
  16. 2022GANimator: Neural Motion Synthesis from a Single Sequencecited by 23
  17. 2022Unsupervised 3D Pose Transfer with Cross Consistency and Dual Reconstructioncited by 21
  18. 2024HUMOS: Human Motion Model Conditioned on Body Shapecited by 20
  19. 2023TapMo: Shape-aware Motion Generation of Skeleton-free Characterscited by 16
  20. 2024WalkTheDog: Cross-Morphology Motion Alignment via Phase Manifoldscited by 14
  21. 2024Skinned Motion Retargeting with Dense Geometric Interaction Perceptioncited by 13
  22. 2024DNF: Unconditional 4D Generation with Dictionary-based Neural Fieldscited by 8
  23. 2024Motion Keyframe Interpolation for Any Human Skeleton via Temporally Consistent Point Cloud Sampling and Reconstructioncited by 5
  24. 2024DragPoser: Motion Reconstruction from Variable Sparse Tracking Signals via Latent Space Optimizationcited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 13; 2026: 28.

41 papers.

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  1. 2025Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Modelscited by 43
  2. 2025Motion2Motion: Cross-topology Motion Transfer with Sparse Correspondencecited by 19
  3. 2025AnimaX: Animating the Inanimate in 3D with Joint Video-Pose Diffusion Modelscited by 15
  4. 2025MoCapAnything: Unified 3D Motion Capture for Arbitrary Skeletons from Monocular Videoscited by 10
  5. 2025Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarkscited by 8
  6. 2025Auto-Connect: Connectivity-Preserving RigFormer with Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 7
  7. 2025ARMO: Autoregressive Rigging for Multi-Category Objectscited by 4
  8. 2025X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animalscited by 4
  9. 2025Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interactioncited by 4
  10. 2026BiMotion: B-spline Motion for Text-guided Dynamic 3D Character Generationcited by 4
  11. 2025Multi-Embodiment Robotic Retargeting via Guided Diffusion Modelcited by 3
  12. 2026PALUM: Part-based Attention Learning for Unified Motion Retargetingcited by 3
29 more
  1. 2026SynthVerse: A Large-Scale Diverse Synthetic Dataset for Point Trackingcited by 3
  2. 2026NECromancer: Breathing Life into Skeletons via BVH Animationcited by 3
  3. 2026AniGen: Unified S3 Fields for Animatable 3D Asset Generationcited by 3
  4. 2026ViPS: Video-informed Pose Spaces for Auto-Rigged Meshescited by 3
  5. 2025Topology-Agnostic Animal Motion Generation from Text Promptcited by 2
  6. 2026MoCapAnything V2: End-to-End Motion Capture for Arbitrary Skeletonscited by 2
  7. 2026ReActor: Reinforcement Learning for Physics-Aware Motion Retargetingcited by 2
  8. 2025MimiCAT: Mimic with Correspondence-Aware Cascade-Transformer for Category-Free 3D Pose Transfercited by 1
  9. 2026DancingBox: A Lightweight MoCap System for Character Animation from Physical Proxiescited by 1
  10. 2026A Unified Conditional Flow for Motion Generation, Editing, and Intra-Structural Retargetingcited by 1
  11. 2026TopoCap: Learning Topology-Agnostic Motion Priors for Monocular Video-to-Animationcited by 1
  12. 2026Follow Your Track: Precise Skeleton Animation Controlled by 3D Trajectoriescited by 1
  13. 2026SAMoR: Motion Modelling for Articulated Objects of Any Skeleton and Topologycited by 1
  14. 2026UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletonscited by 1
  15. 2025FunPhase: A Periodic Functional Autoencoder for Motion Generation via Phase Manifoldscited by 0
  16. 2026Rigel3D: Rig-aware Latents for Animation-Ready 3D Asset Generationcited by 0
  17. 2026R-DMesh: Video-Guided 3D Animation via Rectified Dynamic Mesh Flowcited by 0
  18. 2026Mat'ern Noise for Triangulation-Agnostic Flow Matching on Meshescited by 0
  19. 2026NaP-Control: Navigating Diffusion Prior for Versatile and Fast Character Controlcited by 0
  20. 2026SkelMo: Universal Skeletal Motion Generation for 3D Rigged Shapescited by 0
  21. 2026Neural Motion Blending Across Arbitrary Character Topologiescited by 0
  22. 2026Two2Four: Generative Quadruped Puppeteering from Human Motioncited by 0
  23. 2026UniMo: Unifying Human and Animal Motion Generationcited by 0
  24. 2026Why Cross-Skeleton Retargeting Is Non-Identifiable: Structural Limits of Generative Motion Modelscited by 0
  25. 2026Retargeting Motions to Diverse Skeletons via Learnable Flatteningcited by 0
  26. 2026TAME:Topology-Aware Text-Driven Motion Editing across Heterogeneous Humanoid Skeletonscited by 0
  27. 2026Image Diffusion Models Are Good 3D Human Motion Generatorscited by 0
  28. 2026CAST: Real-Time Motion Capture for Any Skeleton Topologycited by 0
  29. 2026Cepheid: Decoupling Scale from Structure for Cross-Family Motion Completioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025AnyMoLe: Any Character Motion In-betweening Leveraging Video Diffusion Models
  2. 2025From Rigging to Waving: 3D-Guided Diffusion for Natural Animation of Hand-Drawn Characters
  3. 2026Sketch2Motion: Text-driven 2D Sketch to 3D Animation via Diffusion-guided Skeleton Optimization
  4. 2025UniMoGen: Universal Motion Generation
  5. 2025Scalable Motion In-betweening via Diffusion and Physics-Based Character Adaptation
  6. 2025One-to-All Animation: Alignment-Free Character Animation and Image Pose Transfer
  7. 2025AnimaMimic: Imitating 3D Animation from Video Priors
  8. 2023Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation