# MotionMaestro: Masked Tokenization for Unified Motion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37495 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37495/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Effective Tokenizers for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03444/) (2025)
- [Flexible Motion In-betweening with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11126/) (2024)
- [Go to Zero: Towards Zero-shot Motion Generation with Million-scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07095/) (2025)
- [ParCo: Part-Coordinating Text-to-Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18512/) (2024)
- [ScaMo: Exploring the Scaling Law in Autoregressive Motion Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14559/) (2024)
- [MoGenTS: Motion Generation based on Spatial-Temporal Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17686/) (2024)
- [SALAD: Skeleton-aware Latent Diffusion for Text-driven Motion Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13836/) (2025)
- [HY-Motion 1.0: Scaling Flow Matching Models for Text-To-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23464/) (2025)
- [MotionLab: Unified Human Motion Generation and Editing via the Motion-Condition-Motion Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02358/) (2025)
- [UMO: Unified In-Context Learning Unlocks Motion Foundation Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15975/) (2026)
- [OmniMotion-X: Versatile Multimodal Whole-Body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19789/) (2025)
- [MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23264/) (2026)
- [RoMo: A Large-Scale, Richly Organized Dataset and Semantic Taxonomy for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26241/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human motion generation plays an important role in applications such as character animation, virtual environments, and embodied interaction. While existing approaches have achieved remarkable progress, many of them are developed for individual tasks, including text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, and trajectory control. Although these tasks involve different types of conditions, a unified framework capable of handling them within a common representation would greatly simplify motion generation systems. We observe that diverse motion conditions can be naturally formulated as different observation patterns over motion sequences, where each task corresponds to a specific masking strategy. Based on this insight, we introduce MotionMaestro, a unified motion generation framework that learns a shared representation for complete motions and heterogeneous partial observations through masked motion tokenization. MotionMaestro employs a three-stage training strategy that first learns a masked motion tokenizer, then refines its reconstruction ability on clean motions, and finally trains a conditional flow-matching generator in the learned latent space. Furthermore, we introduce an observation map and an observation loss to explicitly preserve provided motion conditions during generation. With this unified representation and conditioning mechanism, MotionMaestro supports text-guided and unconditional synthesis, pose conditioning and partial completion, temporal interpolation, trajectory control, and motion continuation. Experiments on the large-scale RoMo and MotionMillion datasets show state-of-the-art performance across diverse motion generation tasks.