# DiMo: Discrete Diffusion Modeling for Motion Generation and Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Robust Motion In-betweening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04942/) (2021)
- [Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12577/) (2023)
- [HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09561/) (2017)
- [FineMoGen: Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Motion Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15004/) (2023)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [Discrete Diffusion in Large Language and Multimodal Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13759/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [UMo: Unified Sparse Motion Modeling for Real-Time Co-Speech Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14731/) (2026)
- [BiMoGen: Bidirectional Motion-Text Generation via Unified Masked Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35407/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prior masked modeling motion generation methods predominantly study text-to-motion. We present DiMo, a discrete diffusion-style framework, which extends masked modeling to bidirectional text--motion understanding and generation. Unlike GPT-style autoregressive approaches that tokenize motion and decode sequentially, DiMo performs iterative masked token refinement, unifying Text-to-Motion (T2M), Motion-to-Text (M2T), and text-free Motion-to-Motion (M2M) within a single model. This decoding paradigm naturally enables a quality-latency trade-off at inference via the number of refinement steps. We further improve motion token fidelity with residual vector quantization (RVQ) and enhance alignment and controllability with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show strong motion quality and competitive bidirectional understanding under a unified framework. In addition, we demonstrate model ability in text-free motion completion, text-guided motion prediction and motion caption correction without architectural change. Additional qualitative results are available on our project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/DiMo/.