# DuetGen: Music Driven Two-Person Dance Generation via Hierarchical Masked Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18680/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05684/) (2023)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10900/) (2023)
- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [DanceFormer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with Parametric Motion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10206/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generate Diverse Dance Motions with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08171/) (2020)
- [Dance Revolution: Long-Term Dance Generation with Music via Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06119/) (2020)
- [TM2D: Bimodality Driven 3D Dance Generation via Music-Text Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02419/) (2023)
- [UDE: A Unified Driving Engine for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16016/) (2022)
- [MotionFix: Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00712/) (2024)
- [ReMoS: 3D Motion-Conditioned Reaction Synthesis for Two-Person Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17057/) (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)
- [Duolando: Follower GPT with Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Dance Accompaniment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18811/) (2024)
- [InterMask: 3D Human Interaction Generation via Collaborative Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10010/) (2024)
- [Interaction Transformer for Human Reaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01685/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Unified Multi-Modal Interactive & Reactive 3D Motion Generation via Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24099/) (2025)
- [ViBES: A Conversational Agent with Behaviorally-Intelligent 3D Virtual Body](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14234/) (2025)
- [TeamHOI: Learning a Unified Policy for Cooperative Human-Object Interactions with Any Team Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07988/) (2026)
- [ActionPlan: Future-Aware Streaming Motion Synthesis via Frame-Level Action Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13500/) (2026)
- [UMO: Unified In-Context Learning Unlocks Motion Foundation Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15975/) (2026)
- [MDD: A Dataset for Text-and-Music Conditioned Duet Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16911/) (2025)
- [Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19255/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Forcing for Multi-Agent Interaction Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17900/) (2025)
- [ScaleMoGen: Autoregressive Next-Scale Prediction for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11704/) (2026)
- [MoLingo: Motion-Language Alignment for Text-to-Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13840/) (2025)
- [EchoAvatar: Real-time Generative Avatar Animation from Audio Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28272/) (2026)
- [MANGO:Natural Multi-speaker 3D Talking Head Generation via 2D-Lifted Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01749/) (2026)
- [Generative human motion mimicking through feature extraction in denoising diffusion settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00011/) (2025)
- [Dancing Points: Synthesizing Ballroom Dancing with Three-Point Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02096/) (2026)
- [Exploring Motion-Language Alignment for Text-driven Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02973/) (2026)
- [PianoFlow: Music-Aware Streaming Piano Motion Generation with Bimanual Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12856/) (2026)
- [EgoMotion: Hierarchical Reasoning and Diffusion for Egocentric Vision-Language Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19105/) (2026)
- [A Few-Step Generative Model on Cumulative Flow Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03623/) (2026)
- [InterCMDM: Block-Causal Diffusion for Autoregressive Human Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01743/) (2026)
- [ARMS: Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming for Seamless Solo-Social Motion Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05733/) (2026)
- [GNOCHI: Generative Neural mOdel for Close Human-Human Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10408/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present DuetGen, a novel framework for generating interactive two-person dances from music. The key challenge of this task lies in the inherent complexities of two-person dance interactions, where the partners need to synchronize both with each other and with the music. Inspired by the recent advances in motion synthesis, we propose a two-stage solution: encoding two-person motions into discrete tokens and then generating these tokens from music. To effectively capture intricate interactions, we represent both dancers' motions as a unified whole to learn the necessary motion tokens, and adopt a coarse-to-fine learning strategy in both the stages. Our first stage utilizes a VQ-VAE that hierarchically separates high-level semantic features at a coarse temporal resolution from low-level details at a finer resolution, producing two discrete token sequences at different abstraction levels. Subsequently, in the second stage, two generative masked transformers learn to map music signals to these dance tokens: the first producing high-level semantic tokens, and the second, conditioned on music and these semantic tokens, producing the low-level tokens. We train both transformers to learn to predict randomly masked tokens within the sequence, enabling them to iteratively generate motion tokens by filling an empty token sequence during inference. Through the hierarchical masked modeling and dedicated interaction representation, DuetGen achieves the generation of synchronized and interactive two-person dances across various genres. Extensive experiments and user studies on a benchmark duet dance dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of DuetGen in motion realism, music-dance alignment, and partner coordination.