# HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08270 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 85 of its 123 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (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)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (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)
- [EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10658/) (2022)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05684/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [MotionStreamer: Streaming Motion Generation via Diffusion-based Autoregressive Model in Causal Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15451/) (2025)
- [Go to Zero: Towards Zero-shot Motion Generation with Million-scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07095/) (2025)
- [SIGMAN:Scaling 3D Human Gaussian Generation with Millions of Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06982/) (2025)
- [TOUCH: Text-guided Controllable Generation of Free-Form Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14874/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Gloria: Consistent Character Video Generation via Content Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29931/) (2026)
- [EXPLORE-Bench: Egocentric Scene Prediction with Long-Horizon Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09731/) (2026)
- [End-to-End Spatial-Temporal Transformer for Real-time 4D HOI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14435/) (2026)
- [ReactMotion: Generating Reactive Listener Motions from Speaker Utterance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15083/) (2026)
- [LogiShot: Logically Coherent Cross-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08820/) (2026)
- [NOUS: Video-Driven 3D Human Reaction Generation via Observation-Reaction Mutual Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20187/) (2026)
- [EgoMotion: Hierarchical Reasoning and Diffusion for Egocentric Vision-Language Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19105/) (2026)
- [Inter-X++: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20312/) (2026)
- [TKCAM: Text and Keyframe to Camera Trajectory Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11105/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human reaction generation represents a significant research domain for interactive AI, as humans constantly interact with their surroundings. Previous works focus mainly on synthesizing the reactive motion given a human motion sequence. This paradigm limits interaction categories to human-human interactions and ignores emotions that may influence reaction generation. In this work, we propose to generate 3D human reactions from RGB videos, which involves a wider range of interaction categories and naturally provides information about expressions that may reflect the subject's emotions. To cope with this task, we present HERO, a simple yet powerful framework for Human rEaction geneRation from videOs. HERO considers both global and frame-level local representations of the video to extract the interaction intention, and then uses the extracted interaction intention to guide the synthesis of the reaction. Besides, local visual representations are continuously injected into the model to maximize the exploitation of the dynamic properties inherent in videos. Furthermore, the ViMo dataset containing paired Video-Motion data is collected to support the task. In addition to human-human interactions, these video-motion pairs also cover animal-human interactions and scene-human interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our methodology. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://jackyu6.github.io/HERO.