# Ponimator: Unfolding Interactive Pose for Versatile Human-human Interaction Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14976/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [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)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12577/) (2023)
- [InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05684/) (2023)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [Inter-X: Towards Versatile Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16051/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10632/) (2026)
- [UMO: Unified In-Context Learning Unlocks Motion Foundation Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15975/) (2026)
- [Diffusion Forcing for Multi-Agent Interaction Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17900/) (2025)
- [MoRight: Motion Control Done Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07348/) (2026)
- [Stability-Driven Motion Generation for Object-Guided Human-Human Co-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20336/) (2026)
- [GNOCHI: Generative Neural mOdel for Close Human-Human Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10408/) (2026)
- [Inter-X++: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20312/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Close-proximity human-human interactive poses convey rich contextual information about interaction dynamics. Given such poses, humans can intuitively infer the context and anticipate possible past and future dynamics, drawing on strong priors of human behavior. Inspired by this observation, we propose Ponimator, a simple framework anchored on proximal interactive poses for versatile interaction animation. Our training data consists of close-contact two-person poses and their surrounding temporal context from motion-capture interaction datasets. Leveraging interactive pose priors, Ponimator employs two conditional diffusion models: (1) a pose animator that uses the temporal prior to generate dynamic motion sequences from interactive poses, and (2) a pose generator that applies the spatial prior to synthesize interactive poses from a single pose, text, or both when interactive poses are unavailable. Collectively, Ponimator supports diverse tasks, including image-based interaction animation, reaction animation, and text-to-interaction synthesis, facilitating the transfer of interaction knowledge from high-quality mocap data to open-world scenarios. Empirical experiments across diverse datasets and applications demonstrate the universality of the pose prior and the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.