# Generative Learning as a Tool to Improve Perception of Emotional Body Motion Expressions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28769/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Deep Facial Expression Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08348/) (2018)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00976/) (2023)
- [X2Face: A network for controlling face generation by using images, audio, and pose codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10550/) (2018)
- [BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05297/) (2022)
- [We are More than Our Joints: Predicting how 3D Bodies Move](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00619/) (2020)
- [Text2Gestures: A Transformer-Based Network for Generating Emotive Body Gestures for Virtual Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11101/) (2021)
- [EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Emotion Transition Learning for Diverse 3D Co-speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17532/) (2023)
- [Emotionally Enhanced Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11548/) (2023)
- [A Unified Framework for Multimodal, Multi-Part Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16471/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data Generation by Supervised Neural Gas Network for Physiological Emotion Recognition Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16353/) (2025)
- [Survey on Emotion Recognition through Posture Detection and the possibility of its application in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01728/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional body motion expressions are an essential element of non-verbal communication. Effectively conveying these expressions through technology is of utmost importance, for example, with virtual reality avatars and in social robotics. Recent advances in generative models have opened new opportunities for advancing research on emotional body motion learning. However, generating accurate emotional expression representations is challenging, given the subtlety of emotional cues, individual variability, and cultural differences. We investigate whether a generative model can implicitly learn emotional body motions directly from culturally grounded motion-capture data, without explicit emotion-motion guidance. Using a dataset of emotional performances by 49 Japanese actors, we trained a Transformer-based generative model to generate expressive motions conditioned on 13 discrete emotion labels. We evaluate the generated motions from two perspectives: (1) an LSTM-based classifier to assess recognizability by machine observers, achieving a recognition accuracy of 22.80%, and (2) a human perception study with Japanese raters to assess alignment with human affective interpretations, yielding a recognition accuracy of 24.91%. Beyond these, we evaluate the utility of generative modeling for three practical tasks: augmenting emotion recognition models, extracting representative emotion-specific motion patterns, and synthesizing smooth transitions between emotion intensities. Our findings highlight the potential of implicit, data-driven generative modeling to enhance affective computing applications and our understanding of emotion expressions.