# DC-Motion: Decoupling Structure and Details via Discrete-Continuous Tokens for Human Motion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14721/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 13 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [ReMoDiffuse: Retrieval-Augmented Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01116/) (2023)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04066/) (2022)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03596/) (2023)
- [Text2Action: Generative Adversarial Synthesis from Language to Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05298/) (2017)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)
- [Skinned Motion Retargeting with Residual Perception of Motion Semantics & Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08658/) (2023)
- [SemTalk: Holistic Co-speech Motion Generation with Frame-level Semantic Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16563/) (2024)
- [Joint-bone Fusion Graph Convolutional Network for Semi-supervised Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04075/) (2022)
- [Light-T2M: A Lightweight and Fast Model for Text-to-motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11193/) (2024)
- [Generative Zoo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08101/) (2024)
- [Motion-example-controlled Co-speech Gesture Generation Leveraging Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20220/) (2025)
- [LLaMo: Scaling Pretrained Language Models for Unified Motion Understanding and Generation with Continuous Autoregressive Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12370/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-motion generation requires modeling both global action structure and fine-grained motion dynamics from natural language. Existing approaches typically rely on either continuous diffusion models or vector-quantized discrete representations. Diffusion models generate smooth motions but lack explicit compositional structure for temporal planning, while discrete token-based methods improve controllability but compress motion into finite codebooks, losing fine-grained dynamics. We argue that this limitation stems from a representation mismatch: action semantics such as intent, phase transitions, and temporal layout are inherently discrete and compositional, whereas joint trajectories and motion dynamics are continuous and locally correlated. To address this, we propose DC-Motion, a discrete-continuous factorized framework for human motion generation. DC-Motion decomposes motion into discrete structural tokens capturing global action layout and continuous residual latents modeling fine-grained dynamics. A text-conditioned structure generator predicts discrete tokens via iterative masked modeling, and a diffusion-based residual generator produces continuous motion conditioned on the structure. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML demonstrate that DC-Motion achieves strong performance in both FID and R-Precision, outperforming representative diffusion-based and discrete-token baselines.