# Zero-Gated Language-conditioned Human Motion Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29208/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05298/) (2015)
- [History Repeats Itself: Human Motion Prediction via Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11755/) (2020)
- [A Spatio-temporal Transformer for 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08692/) (2020)
- [MSR-GCN: Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Networks for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07152/) (2021)
- [Space-Time-Separable Graph Convolutional Network for Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04573/) (2021)
- [Learning Constrained Dynamic Correlations in Spatiotemporal Graphs for Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01297/) (2022)
- [Context-based Interpretable Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Human Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19237/) (2024)
- [HumanCM: One Step Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16709/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pose histories provide the core kinematic evidence for 3D human motion prediction, but they lack explicit high-level semantic guidance. This paper introduces ZGL, a lightweight language-conditioned predictor that uses captions of the observed motion as a semantic prior while preserving a strong motion backbone as the main source of dynamics. We render only the observed poses, generate a one-sentence description with a vision-language model, encode the caption with a frozen CLIP-L text tower, and project it into a small set of conditioning tokens. These tokens are injected into a DCT-based spatial-temporal Transformer by compact crossattention adapters with zero gates: each adapter output is multiplied by a learnable gate initialized to zero, so the full network is numerically identical to the pose-only baseline at initialization and can learn to use language only when it reduces prediction error. On Human3.6M, ZGL improves overall MPJPE over representative motion-prediction baselines in our comparison. Results on CMUMocap further show that compact caption conditioning transfers to a second benchmark and provides a practical semantic cue for 3D human motion prediction.