# MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 63 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12577/) (2023)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19759/) (2024)
- [MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03596/) (2023)
- [AttT2M: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Multi-Perspective Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00796/) (2023)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [MoSAT: Human Motion Generation from Spatial Audio and Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23797/) (2026)
- [MixiMotion: One-Step Text-to-Motion Generation via Asymmetric Set Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23010/) (2026)
- [MotionMaestro: Masked Tokenization for Unified Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37495/) (2026)
- [TACD: Distilling Efficient Text-to-Motion Models via Terminal Amplification Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02867/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-motion generation aims to generate 3D human motions that are tightly aligned with the input text while remaining physically plausible and rich in fine-grained detail. Although recent approaches can produce complex and natural movements, they usually operate at only one temporal scale, which limits both semantic alignment and temporal coherence. Inspired by the fact that complex motions are conceptualized hierarchically rather than at a single temporal scale in the human cognitive system, we propose textitMotionHiFlow, a hierarchical flow matching framework to generate motion progressively by constructing flow path from low to high temporal scales. The flows at lower scales capture high-level semantics and coarse motion structures, while flows at higher scales refine temporal details. To link the flows across scales, we introduce a novel cross-scale transition process, ensuring continuity and preserving noise consistency. Furthermore, by integrating a Text-Motion Diffusion Transformer and a topology-aware Motion VAE, MotionHiFlow explicitly models structural dependencies among joints via joint-aware positional encoding and skeletal topology, enabling precise semantic alignment alongside fine-grained motion details. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies confirming the effectiveness of the hierarchical design and key components. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-lh/MotionHiFlow.