# NECromancer: Breathing Life into Skeletons via BVH Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06548/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (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)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01116/) (2023)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [L4GM: Large 4D Gaussian Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10324/) (2024)
- [Skeleton-Aware Networks for Deep Motion Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05732/) (2020)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)
- [DartControl: A Diffusion-Based Autoregressive Motion Model for Real-Time Text-Driven Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05260/) (2024)
- [Who Left the Dogs Out? 3D Animal Reconstruction with Expectation Maximization in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11110/) (2020)
- [DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06756/) (2024)
- [AnyTop: Character Animation Diffusion with Any Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17327/) (2025)
- [MotionGPT3: Human Motion as a Second Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24086/) (2025)
- [AvatarGO: Zero-shot 4D Human-Object Interaction Generation and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07164/) (2024)
- [Beat-It: Beat-Synchronized Multi-Condition 3D Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07554/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SAMoR: Motion Modelling for Articulated Objects of Any Skeleton and Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02148/) (2026)
- [AnyAct: Towards Human Reenactment of Character Motion From Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15497/) (2026)
- [TAME:Topology-Aware Text-Driven Motion Editing across Heterogeneous Humanoid Skeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04529/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Motion tokenization is a key component of generalizable motion models, yet most existing approaches are restricted to species-specific skeletons, limiting their applicability across diverse morphologies. We propose NECromancer (NEC), a universal motion tokenizer that operates directly on arbitrary BVH skeletons. NEC consists of three components: (1) an Ontology-aware Skeletal Graph Encoder (OwO) that encodes structural priors from BVH files, including joint semantics, rest-pose offsets, and skeletal topology, into skeletal embeddings; (2) a Topology-Agnostic Tokenizer (TAT) that compresses motion sequences into a universal, topology-invariant discrete representation; and (3) the Unified BVH Universe (UvU), a large-scale dataset aggregating BVH motions across heterogeneous skeletons. Experiments show that NEC achieves high-fidelity reconstruction under substantial compression and effectively disentangles motion from skeletal structure. The resulting token space supports cross-species motion transfer, composition, denoising, generation with token-based models, and text-motion retrieval, establishing a unified framework for motion analysis and synthesis across diverse morphologies. Demo page: https://animotionlab.github.io/NECromancer/