# Plan, Don't Pose: Long Composite Motion Generation with Text-Aligned BFM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29906/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [Successor Features for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05312/) (2016)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06456/) (2023)
- [TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00976/) (2023)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)
- [Learning One Representation to Optimize All Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07945/) (2021)
- [CALM: Conditional Adversarial Latent Models for Directable Virtual Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02195/) (2023)
- [Does Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Exist?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14935/) (2022)
- [Learning Successor States and Goal-Dependent Values: A Mathematical Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07123/) (2021)
- [Go to Zero: Towards Zero-shot Motion Generation with Million-scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07095/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Whole-Body Humanoid Control via Behavioral Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11054/) (2025)
- [BFM-Zero: A Promptable Behavioral Foundation Model for Humanoid Control Using Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04131/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-motion (T2M) generation has broad applications in character animation, virtual avatars, and human-robot interaction. Existing methods typically generate pose trajectories or motion tokens directly from language, forcing a single model to handle semantic interpretation, long-horizon structure, and low-level physical realization. This coupling makes them costly and often unreliable for long, compositional, or semantically dense prompts. We propose Text2BFM, the first framework that aligns natural language with pretrained Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for T2M generation without relying on heavy end-to-end motion generators. Text2BFM operates in the latent policy space of a frozen BFM, using it as an executable motion prior. A text-aligned variational behavioral bottleneck compresses BFM policy-latent sequences into compact motion representations that are compatible with language and preserve long-horizon behavioral structure. Generation is performed in this compact behavioral manifold with a lightweight conditional generator, and the resulting latent encoded behaviors are decoded into policy latents that drive the pretrained frozen BFM. By decoupling semantic planning from motion execution, Text2BFM achieves efficient, robust T2M generation and strong performance on long, compositional textual descriptions.
