# Walk Before You Dance: High-fidelity and Editable Dance Synthesis via Generative Masked Motion Prior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04634/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00341/) (2020)
- [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)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)
- [TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04066/) (2022)
- [FineDance: A Fine-grained Choreography Dataset for 3D Full Body Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03741/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Diverse Dance Motions with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08171/) (2020)
- [TM2D: Bimodality Driven 3D Dance Generation via Music-Text Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02419/) (2023)
- [Priority-Centric Human Motion Generation in Discrete Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14480/) (2023)
- [Lodge: A Coarse to Fine Diffusion Network for Long Dance Generation Guided by the Characteristic Dance Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10518/) (2024)
- [Gumbel-softmax-based Optimization: A Simple General Framework for Optimization Problems on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07300/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DanceCrafter: Fine-Grained Text-Driven Controllable Dance Generation via Choreographic Syntax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18648/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in dance generation have enabled the automatic synthesis of 3D dance motions. However, existing methods still face significant challenges in simultaneously achieving high realism, precise dance-music synchronization, diverse motion expression, and physical plausibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach that leverages a generative masked text-to-motion model as a distribution prior to learn a probabilistic mapping from diverse guidance signals, including music, genre, and pose, into high-quality dance motion sequences. Our framework also supports semantic motion editing, such as motion inpainting and body part modification. Specifically, we introduce a multi-tower masked motion model that integrates a text-conditioned masked motion backbone with two parallel, modality-specific branches: a music-guidance tower and a pose-guidance tower. The model is trained using synchronized and progressive masked training, which allows effective infusion of the pretrained text-to-motion prior into the dance synthesis process while enabling each guidance branch to optimize independently through its own loss function, mitigating gradient interference. During inference, we introduce classifier-free logits guidance and pose-guided token optimization to strengthen the influence of music, genre, and pose signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method sets a new state of the art in dance generation, significantly advancing both the quality and editability over existing approaches. Project Page available at https://foram-s1.github.io/DanceMosaic/