# Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [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)
- [LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05961/) (2024)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [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)
- [TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00976/) (2023)
- [Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01893/) (2023)
- [MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03596/) (2023)
- [MaskedMimic: Unified Physics-Based Character Control Through Masked Motion Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14393/) (2024)
- [TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02833/) (2025)
- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Marionette: Predicting World States, Rendering Geometry, Painting Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14530/) (2026)
- [SCRIPT: Scalable Diffusion Policy with Multi-stage Training for Language-driven Physics-Based Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22894/) (2026)
- [SentiAvatar: Towards Expressive and Interactive Digital Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02908/) (2026)
- [TEXEDO : Test Time Scaling for Controller-aware Language-conditioned Humanoid Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22998/) (2026)
- [Asset Harvester: Extracting 3D Assets from Autonomous Driving Logs for Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18468/) (2026)
- [Humanoid-DART: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation using Diffusion-guided Augmentation through Relabeling and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26855/) (2026)
- [GenTrack: Physical Alignment for Robot-Native Motion Generation and Zero-Shot Humanoid Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01410/) (2026)
- [A Unified Conditional Flow for Motion Generation, Editing, and Intra-Structural Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13427/) (2026)
- [UMo: Unified Sparse Motion Modeling for Real-Time Co-Speech Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14731/) (2026)
- [MIND: Multi-Scale Intent Diffusion for Text-Driven Physics-Based Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26006/) (2026)
- [AnyMo: Scaling Any-Modality Conditional Motion Generation with Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29488/) (2026)
- [TAPVid-MV: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in 3D Across Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01899/) (2026)
- [UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05415/) (2026)
- [Weave: Learning Whole-Body Dexterous Loco-Manipulation from Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16683/) (2026)
- [DanceCrafter: Fine-Grained Text-Driven Controllable Dance Generation via Choreographic Syntax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18648/) (2026)
- [SCAMP: Sparse-anchor Control is One Small Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14716/) (2026)
- [AnyAct: Towards Human Reenactment of Character Motion From Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15497/) (2026)
- [Plan, Don't Pose: Long Composite Motion Generation with Text-Aligned BFM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29906/) (2026)
- [Controllable Dynamic 3D Shape Generation via 3D Trajectories and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05162/) (2026)
- [Real-time body pose non-verbal communication with a consistency-based reliability measure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09390/) (2026)
- [Per-Stroke Temporal Control for Text-to-Motion via Action Units and Action-Detection Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15717/) (2026)
- [Direct Clinical Joint Angle Extraction from Parametric Body Model Rotation Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17639/) (2026)
- [MIME: Multimodal Interactive Motion Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22702/) (2026)
- [Two2Four: Generative Quadruped Puppeteering from Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26108/) (2026)
- [Learning to Understand Body Language from Flight through Robust 3D Avatar Placing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27865/) (2026)
- [Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18184/) (2026)
- [Generative Embodied Multiple Behavior Control Systems for Human-like Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22691/) (2026)
- [Sample, Simulate, Select: Physics-in-the-Loop Text-to-Motion for Humanoids Without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26420/) (2026)
- [NavSafe-∞: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Driving Safety in Photorealistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26618/) (2026)
- [FloodDiffusion 2: Efficient and Path Controllable Streaming Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33167/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality human motion data is becoming increasingly important for applications in robotics, simulation, and entertainment. Recent generative models offer a potential data source, enabling human motion synthesis through intuitive inputs like text prompts or kinematic constraints on poses. However, the small scale of public mocap datasets has limited the motion quality, control accuracy, and generalization of these models. In this work, we introduce Kimodo, an expressive and controllable kinematic motion diffusion model trained on 700 hours of optical motion capture data. Our model generates high-quality motions while being easily controlled through text and a comprehensive suite of kinematic constraints including full-body keyframes, sparse joint positions/rotations, 2D waypoints, and dense 2D paths. This is enabled through a carefully designed motion representation and two-stage denoiser architecture that decomposes root and body prediction to minimize motion artifacts while allowing for flexible constraint conditioning. Experiments on the large-scale mocap dataset justify key design decisions and analyze how the scaling of dataset size and model size affect performance.