# Music-to-Dance Generation via Atomic Movements

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13978 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13978/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [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)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10658/) (2022)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00976/) (2023)
- [Dance Revolution: Long-Term Dance Generation with Music via Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06119/) (2020)
- [TM2D: Bimodality Driven 3D Dance Generation via Music-Text Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02419/) (2023)
- [Lodge: A Coarse to Fine Diffusion Network for Long Dance Generation Guided by the Characteristic Dance Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10518/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00428/) (2021)
- [Beat-It: Beat-Synchronized Multi-Condition 3D Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07554/) (2024)
- [Align Your Rhythm: Generating Highly Aligned Dance Poses with Gating-Enhanced Rhythm-Aware Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17340/) (2025)
- [Interact-Custom: Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19575/) (2025)
- [InteractMove: Text-Controlled Human-Object Interaction Generation in 3D Scenes with Movable Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23612/) (2025)
- [Fractal Patterns in Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12497/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation via Agentic Enhancement and Semantic Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Music-driven dance generation aims to produce human motion that is both rhythmically synchronized and semantically consistent with music. While recent neural approaches have achieved impressive visual realism, they typically model motion as a continuous signal and neglect its compositional nature, making generated dances structurally incoherent and difficult to control. In this work, we introduce a structure-aware framework that models choreography as a sequence of atomic movements-semantically interpretable motion events that serve as the building blocks of dance. To construct this atomic movement vocabulary, we first segment large-scale dance data and cluster them into atomic movement groups. We then employ a large language model to semantically relabel and refine the clusters, yielding a set of interpretable and reusable atomic movements. Based on these atomic movement annotations, we design a two-stage generation framework that mirrors the human choreography process. In the atomic movement planning stage, the model predicts the type, duration, and timing of atomic movements conditioned on the input music, forming a symbolic dance allocation. In the completion stage, a transition-aware generator synthesizes smooth and stylistically coherent motion conditioned on the planned structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces dances with significantly improved structural coherence, rhythmic alignment, and perceptual naturalness compared to existing baselines, while providing enhanced interpretability and controllable editing through explicit structural representation.