# Shape My Moves: Text-Driven Shape-Aware Synthesis of Human Motions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03639/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02438/) (2015)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Analytic-DPM: an Analytic Estimate of the Optimal Reverse Variance in Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06503/) (2022)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10658/) (2022)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05162/) (2025)
- [Beyond Global Alignment: Fine-Grained Motion-Language Retrieval via Pyramidal Shapley-Taylor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21904/) (2026)
- [Next-Scale Autoregressive Models for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03799/) (2026)
- [Topology-Agnostic Animal Motion Generation from Text Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10352/) (2025)
- [U-Mind: A Unified Framework for Real-Time Multimodal Interaction with Audiovisual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23739/) (2026)
- [ReactMotion: Generating Reactive Listener Motions from Speaker Utterance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15083/) (2026)
- [IAM: Identity-Aware Human Motion and Shape Joint Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25164/) (2026)
- [FashionPose: Unified Text-Driven Fashion Synthesis with Joint Geometric and Photometric Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13311/) (2025)
- [Odoriko: A Shape-Aware Multimodal Diffusion Framework for Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21135/) (2026)
- [MorphoStyle: Motion Style Transfer with Morphology Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14189/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore how body shapes influence human motion synthesis, an aspect often overlooked in existing text-to-motion generation methods due to the ease of learning a homogenized, canonical body shape. However, this homogenization can distort the natural correlations between different body shapes and their motion dynamics. Our method addresses this gap by generating body-shape-aware human motions from natural language prompts. We utilize a finite scalar quantization-based variational autoencoder (FSQ-VAE) to quantize motion into discrete tokens and then leverage continuous body shape information to de-quantize these tokens back into continuous, detailed motion. Additionally, we harness the capabilities of a pretrained language model to predict both continuous shape parameters and motion tokens, facilitating the synthesis of text-aligned motions and decoding them into shape-aware motions. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively, and also conduct a comprehensive perceptual study to demonstrate its efficacy in generating shape-aware motions.