mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy

arXiv 2505.19377 ↗First posted 26 May 2025cs.CVcited by 29

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Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art text-to-motion generation models rely on the kinematic-aware, local-relative motion representation popularized by HumanML3D, which encodes motion relative to the pelvis and to the previous frame with built-in redundancy. While this design simplifies training for earlier generation models, it introduces critical limitations for diffusion models and hinders applicability to downstream tasks. In this work, we revisit the motion representation and propose a radically simplified and long-abandoned alternative for text-to-motion generation: absolute joint coordinates in global space. Through systematic analysis of design choices, we show that this formulation achieves significantly higher motion fidelity, improved text alignment, and strong scalability, even with a simple Transformer backbone and no auxiliary kinematic-aware losses. Moreover, our formulation naturally supports downstream tasks such as text-driven motion control and temporal/spatial editing without additional task-specific reengineering and costly classifier guidance generation from control signals. Finally, we demonstrate promising generalization to directly generate SMPL-H mesh vertices in motion from text, laying a strong foundation for future research and motion-related applications.

Key facts. Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 116 of its 129 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

Builds on

116 of 129 references.

References · 116

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  3. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
  4. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  5. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  6. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  7. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
  8. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  9. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  10. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,503
  11. 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,703
  12. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
38 more
  1. 2019AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapescited by 1,236
  2. 2022MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformercited by 1,099
  3. 2022Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 1,080
  4. 2022MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Modelcited by 780
  5. 2016Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Imagecited by 695
  6. 2023T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representationscited by 588
  7. 2022Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Spacecited by 575
  8. 2023MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Languagecited by 527
  9. 2022TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptionscited by 492
  10. 2020Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motionscited by 441
  11. 2022MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Spacecited by 408
  12. 2023MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motionscited by 400
  13. 2022PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 368
  14. 2022TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Textscited by 359
  15. 2023Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Priorcited by 357
  16. 2016The KIT Motion-Language Datasetcited by 338
  17. 2023ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 287
  18. 2020Query-Key Normalization for Transformerscited by 280
  19. 2019Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecastingcited by 257
  20. 2023Diffusion-based Generation, Optimization, and Planning in 3D Scenescited by 239
  21. 2023OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generationcited by 238
  22. 2023Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Datasetcited by 227
  23. 2023Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesiscited by 223
  24. 2022FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editingcited by 217
  25. 2023Object Motion Guided Human Motion Synthesiscited by 212
  26. 2023InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactionscited by 206
  27. 2023TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesiscited by 198
  28. 2023InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusioncited by 182
  29. 2021Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptionscited by 178
  30. 2024MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Modelcited by 168
  31. 2023MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generatorscited by 145
  32. 2023Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusioncited by 138
  33. 2023CG-HOI: Contact-Guided 3D Human-Object Interaction Generationcited by 138
  34. 2024Scaling Up Dynamic Human-Scene Interaction Modelingcited by 137
  35. 2023MMM: Generative Masked Motion Modelcited by 131
  36. 2023AttT2M: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Multi-Perspective Attention Mechanismcited by 117
  37. 2024Motion Mamba: Efficient and Long Sequence Motion Generationcited by 112
  38. 2023Synthesizing Diverse Human Motions in 3D Indoor Scenescited by 109

50 most cited of 116 All 116 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 20.

29 papers.

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  1. 2025SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 101
  2. 2026Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generationcited by 37
  3. 2025Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarkscited by 8
  4. 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 6
  5. 2025Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Modelscited by 6
  6. 2026ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Controlcited by 5
  7. 2026ActionPlan: Future-Aware Streaming Motion Synthesis via Frame-Level Action Planningcited by 5
  8. 2025X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animalscited by 4
  9. 2025Decoupled Generative Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Synthesiscited by 3
  10. 2025MoLingo: Motion-Language Alignment for Text-to-Human Motion Generationcited by 2
  11. 2026Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interactioncited by 1
  12. 2026MotionRFT: Unified Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 1
17 more
  1. 2026Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generationcited by 1
  2. 2026MultiAct: Text-to-Motion Generation from Composite Text via Tailored Attention Guidancecited by 1
  3. 2026KV-Control: Parameter-Efficient K/V Injection for Trajectory-Controlled Text-to-Motioncited by 1
  4. 2026UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletonscited by 1
  5. 2025Pressure2Motion: Hierarchical Human Motion Reconstruction from Ground Pressure with Text Guidancecited by 0
  6. 2025FunPhase: A Periodic Functional Autoencoder for Motion Generation via Phase Manifoldscited by 0
  7. 2026Exploring Motion-Language Alignment for Text-driven Motion Generationcited by 0
  8. 2026Marrying Text-to-Motion Generation with Skeleton-Based Action Recognitioncited by 0
  9. 2026EgoForce: Robust Online Egocentric Motion Reconstruction via Diffusion Forcingcited by 0
  10. 2026Text Dictates, Music Decorates: Energy-based Attention for Editable Dance Motion Generationcited by 0
  11. 2026ARMS: Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming for Seamless Solo-Social Motion Transitionscited by 0
  12. 2026LYRIC: Language-Driven Physics-Based Character Control for Contact-Rich Whole-Body Object Interactioncited by 0
  13. 2026Timo: Taming Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Human Motion Generationcited by 0
  14. 2026MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Spacecited by 0
  15. 2026BiMoGen: Bidirectional Motion-Text Generation via Unified Masked Discrete Diffusioncited by 0
  16. 2026TACD: Distilling Efficient Text-to-Motion Models via Terminal Amplification Controlcited by 0
  17. 2026CleanMDM: Clean Motion Diffusion Model for Multimodal Motion Cleanupcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026PRISM: Streaming Human Motion Generation with Per-Joint Latent Decomposition
  2. 2026Coordinating Multiple Conditions for Trajectory-Controlled Human Motion Generation
  3. 2026MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching
  4. 2026Image Diffusion Models Are Good 3D Human Motion Generators
  5. 2023Priority-Centric Human Motion Generation in Discrete Latent Space
  6. 2023Plan, Posture and Go: Towards Open-World Text-to-Motion Generation
  7. 2024MotionGPT-2: A General-Purpose Motion-Language Model for Motion Generation and Understanding
  8. 2025Strong and Controllable 3D Motion Generation