Deep Motion Warping via Phase-Conditioned Diffusion Autoencoder

Abstract

Motion warping is a core technique in character animation that enables the adaptation of existing motion data to novel spatio-temporal constraints. Conventional motion warping methods often rely on heuristic modifications that can violate physical consistency or introduce visual artifacts. More recent learning-based editing approaches improve realism, but many of them encode motion into tightly entangled latent space, which makes them struggle to balance editing flexibility and content preservation. To address this, we propose a novel deep motion warping framework that explicitly disentangles the motion structure from global and stylistic attributes for intuitive motion editing. Our key insight is to leverage learned phase features as a continuous and robust representation of the underlying structure, and explicitly disentangle motion into root velocity, phase, and learned latent variables using a phase-conditioned diffusion autoencoder. This design supports a wide range of editing operations, including root motion warping, motion exaggeration, time warping, and style transfer by directly manipulating decoupled components, without requiring paired training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enables high-level, flexible motion editing while strictly preserving the structural consistency and physical plausibility of the source motion