Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy
Not on the map. Why?
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
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
- 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
- 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,503
- 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,703
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
38 more
- 2019AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapescited by 1,236
- 2022MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformercited by 1,099
- 2022Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 1,080
- 2022MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Modelcited by 780
- 2016Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Imagecited by 695
- 2023T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representationscited by 588
- 2022Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Spacecited by 575
- 2023MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Languagecited by 527
- 2022TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptionscited by 492
- 2020Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motionscited by 441
- 2022MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Spacecited by 408
- 2023MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motionscited by 400
- 2022PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 368
- 2022TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Textscited by 359
- 2023Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Priorcited by 357
- 2016The KIT Motion-Language Datasetcited by 338
- 2023ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 287
- 2020Query-Key Normalization for Transformerscited by 280
- 2019Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecastingcited by 257
- 2023Diffusion-based Generation, Optimization, and Planning in 3D Scenescited by 239
- 2023OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generationcited by 238
- 2023Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Datasetcited by 227
- 2023Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesiscited by 223
- 2022FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editingcited by 217
- 2023Object Motion Guided Human Motion Synthesiscited by 212
- 2023InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactionscited by 206
- 2023TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesiscited by 198
- 2023InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusioncited by 182
- 2021Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptionscited by 178
- 2024MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Modelcited by 168
- 2023MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generatorscited by 145
- 2023Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusioncited by 138
- 2023CG-HOI: Contact-Guided 3D Human-Object Interaction Generationcited by 138
- 2024Scaling Up Dynamic Human-Scene Interaction Modelingcited by 137
- 2023MMM: Generative Masked Motion Modelcited by 131
- 2023AttT2M: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Multi-Perspective Attention Mechanismcited by 117
- 2024Motion Mamba: Efficient and Long Sequence Motion Generationcited by 112
- 2023Synthesizing Diverse Human Motions in 3D Indoor Scenescited by 109
50 most cited of 116 All 116 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 20.
29 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2025SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 101
- 2026Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generationcited by 37
- 2025Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarkscited by 8
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 6
- 2025Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Modelscited by 6
- 2026ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Controlcited by 5
- 2026ActionPlan: Future-Aware Streaming Motion Synthesis via Frame-Level Action Planningcited by 5
- 2025X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animalscited by 4
- 2025Decoupled Generative Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Synthesiscited by 3
- 2025MoLingo: Motion-Language Alignment for Text-to-Human Motion Generationcited by 2
- 2026Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interactioncited by 1
- 2026MotionRFT: Unified Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 1
17 more
- 2026Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generationcited by 1
- 2026MultiAct: Text-to-Motion Generation from Composite Text via Tailored Attention Guidancecited by 1
- 2026KV-Control: Parameter-Efficient K/V Injection for Trajectory-Controlled Text-to-Motioncited by 1
- 2026UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletonscited by 1
- 2025Pressure2Motion: Hierarchical Human Motion Reconstruction from Ground Pressure with Text Guidancecited by 0
- 2025FunPhase: A Periodic Functional Autoencoder for Motion Generation via Phase Manifoldscited by 0
- 2026Exploring Motion-Language Alignment for Text-driven Motion Generationcited by 0
- 2026Marrying Text-to-Motion Generation with Skeleton-Based Action Recognitioncited by 0
- 2026EgoForce: Robust Online Egocentric Motion Reconstruction via Diffusion Forcingcited by 0
- 2026Text Dictates, Music Decorates: Energy-based Attention for Editable Dance Motion Generationcited by 0
- 2026ARMS: Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming for Seamless Solo-Social Motion Transitionscited by 0
- 2026LYRIC: Language-Driven Physics-Based Character Control for Contact-Rich Whole-Body Object Interactioncited by 0
- 2026Timo: Taming Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Human Motion Generationcited by 0
- 2026MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Spacecited by 0
- 2026BiMoGen: Bidirectional Motion-Text Generation via Unified Masked Discrete Diffusioncited by 0
- 2026TACD: Distilling Efficient Text-to-Motion Models via Terminal Amplification Controlcited by 0
- 2026CleanMDM: Clean Motion Diffusion Model for Multimodal Motion Cleanupcited by 0
- 2026CleanMDM: Clean Motion Diffusion Model for Multimodal Motion Cleanup4 Oct 2026
- 2026TACD: Distilling Efficient Text-to-Motion Models via Terminal Amplification Control2 Oct 2026
- 2026BiMoGen: Bidirectional Motion-Text Generation via Unified Masked Discrete Diffusion28 Sep 2026
- 2026MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Space28 Sep 2026
- 2026Timo: Taming Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Human Motion Generation25 Sep 2026
- 2026LYRIC: Language-Driven Physics-Based Character Control for Contact-Rich Whole-Body Object Interaction17 Sep 2026
- 2026UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons4 Sep 2026
- 2026ARMS: Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming for Seamless Solo-Social Motion Transitions7 Jul 2026
- 2026Text Dictates, Music Decorates: Energy-based Attention for Editable Dance Motion Generation22 Jun 2026
- 2026KV-Control: Parameter-Efficient K/V Injection for Trajectory-Controlled Text-to-Motion4 Jun 2026
- 2026MultiAct: Text-to-Motion Generation from Composite Text via Tailored Attention Guidance29 May 2026
- 2026EgoForce: Robust Online Egocentric Motion Reconstruction via Diffusion Forcing13 May 2026
17 more
- 2026Marrying Text-to-Motion Generation with Skeleton-Based Action Recognition18 Apr 2026
- 2026Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generation9 Apr 2026
- 2026Exploring Motion-Language Alignment for Text-driven Motion Generation3 Apr 2026
- 2026MotionRFT: Unified Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Motion Generation28 Mar 2026
- 2026Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation16 Mar 2026
- 2026ActionPlan: Future-Aware Streaming Motion Synthesis via Frame-Level Action Planning13 Mar 2026
- 2026Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interaction10 Mar 2026
- 2026ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Control26 Feb 2026
- 2025Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Models22 Dec 2025
- 2025Decoupled Generative Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Synthesis22 Dec 2025
- 2025MoLingo: Motion-Language Alignment for Text-to-Human Motion Generation15 Dec 2025
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation11 Dec 2025
- 2025FunPhase: A Periodic Functional Autoencoder for Motion Generation via Phase Manifolds10 Dec 2025
- 2025SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control11 Nov 2025
- 2025Pressure2Motion: Hierarchical Human Motion Reconstruction from Ground Pressure with Text Guidance7 Nov 2025
- 2025X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animals7 Aug 2025
- 2025Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarks7 Jul 2025
- 2025Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Modelscited by 6
- 2026ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Controlcited by 5
- 2026LYRIC: Language-Driven Physics-Based Character Control for Contact-Rich Whole-Body Object Interactioncited by 0
- 2026Timo: Taming Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Human Motion Generationcited by 0
- 2026MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Spacecited by 0
- 2026BiMoGen: Bidirectional Motion-Text Generation via Unified Masked Discrete Diffusioncited by 0
- 2026CleanMDM: Clean Motion Diffusion Model for Multimodal Motion Cleanupcited by 0
- 2026CleanMDM: Clean Motion Diffusion Model for Multimodal Motion Cleanup4 Oct 2026
- 2026BiMoGen: Bidirectional Motion-Text Generation via Unified Masked Discrete Diffusion28 Sep 2026
- 2026MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Space28 Sep 2026
- 2026Timo: Taming Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Human Motion Generation25 Sep 2026
- 2026LYRIC: Language-Driven Physics-Based Character Control for Contact-Rich Whole-Body Object Interaction17 Sep 2026
- 2026ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Control26 Feb 2026
- 2025Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Models22 Dec 2025
- 2025SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 101
- 2026Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generationcited by 37
- 2025Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarkscited by 8
- 2025IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 6
- 2026ActionPlan: Future-Aware Streaming Motion Synthesis via Frame-Level Action Planningcited by 5
- 2025X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animalscited by 4
- 2025Decoupled Generative Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Synthesiscited by 3
- 2025MoLingo: Motion-Language Alignment for Text-to-Human Motion Generationcited by 2
- 2026Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interactioncited by 1
- 2026MotionRFT: Unified Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Motion Generationcited by 1
- 2026Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generationcited by 1
- 2026MultiAct: Text-to-Motion Generation from Composite Text via Tailored Attention Guidancecited by 1
12 most cited of 22 All 22 (JSON)
- 2026TACD: Distilling Efficient Text-to-Motion Models via Terminal Amplification Control2 Oct 2026
- 2026UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons4 Sep 2026
- 2026ARMS: Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming for Seamless Solo-Social Motion Transitions7 Jul 2026
- 2026Text Dictates, Music Decorates: Energy-based Attention for Editable Dance Motion Generation22 Jun 2026
- 2026KV-Control: Parameter-Efficient K/V Injection for Trajectory-Controlled Text-to-Motion4 Jun 2026
- 2026MultiAct: Text-to-Motion Generation from Composite Text via Tailored Attention Guidance29 May 2026
- 2026EgoForce: Robust Online Egocentric Motion Reconstruction via Diffusion Forcing13 May 2026
- 2026Marrying Text-to-Motion Generation with Skeleton-Based Action Recognition18 Apr 2026
- 2026Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generation9 Apr 2026
- 2026Exploring Motion-Language Alignment for Text-driven Motion Generation3 Apr 2026
- 2026MotionRFT: Unified Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Motion Generation28 Mar 2026
- 2026Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation16 Mar 2026
12 newest of 22 All 22 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026PRISM: Streaming Human Motion Generation with Per-Joint Latent Decomposition
- 2026Coordinating Multiple Conditions for Trajectory-Controlled Human Motion Generation
- 2026MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching
- 2026Image Diffusion Models Are Good 3D Human Motion Generators
- 2023Priority-Centric Human Motion Generation in Discrete Latent Space
- 2023Plan, Posture and Go: Towards Open-World Text-to-Motion Generation
- 2024MotionGPT-2: A General-Purpose Motion-Language Model for Motion Generation and Understanding
- 2025Strong and Controllable 3D Motion Generation