Mar 2026· arXiv.org· Vol abs/2603.26747· 1 citation· 16 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
Comparing diffusion and rectified flow objectives within the MotionGPT3 framework suggests that several known benefits of rectified flow objectives do extend to continuous-latent text-to-motion generation, highlighting the importance of the training objective choice in motion priors.
Abstract
Recent text-driven motion generation methods span both discrete token-based approaches and continuous-latent formulations. MotionGPT3 exemplifies the latter paradigm, combining a learned continuous motion latent space with a diffusion-based prior for text-conditioned synthesis. While rectified flow objectives have recently demonstrated favorable convergence and inference-time properties relative to diffusion in image and audio generation, it remains unclear whether these advantages transfer cleanly to the motion generation setting. In this work, we conduct a controlled empirical study comparing diffusion and rectified flow objectives within the MotionGPT3 framework. By holding the model architecture, training protocol, and evaluation setup fixed, we isolate the effect of the generative objective on training dynamics, final performance, and inference efficiency. Experiments on the HumanML3D dataset show that rectified flow converges in fewer training epochs, reaches strong test performance earlier, and matches or exceeds diffusion-based motion quality under identical conditions. Moreover, flow-based priors exhibit stable behavior across a wide range of inference step counts and achieve competitive quality with fewer sampling steps, yielding improved efficiency-quality trade-offs. Overall, our results suggest that several known benefits of rectified flow objectives do extend to continuous-latent text-to-motion generation, highlighting the importance of the training objective choice in motion priors.
This work proposes FlashMo, a frequency-aware sparse motion diffusion model that prunes low-frequency tokens to enhance efficiency without custom kernel design, and introduces MotionSiT, a scalable diffusion transformer based on a joint-temporal factorized interpolant with Lie group geodesics over SO(3) manifolds, enabling principled generation of joint rotations.
Zeyu Zhang, Yiran Wang, Danning Li et al.· Advances in Neural Informati...· 11 citations
Text-to-motion generation aims to synthesize semantically consistent and naturally coherent motion sequences from natural language descriptions. Given the continuous nature of human motion, diffusion models operating in a continuous latent space offer inherent advantages over vector quantization-based methods, particularly in avoiding quantization errors and in modeling quality. However, existing diffusion models primarily rely on mean squared error loss. This stepwise regression paradigm often leads to ‘over-smoothed’ motion sequences and struggles to capture the subtle semantic nuances embedded in textual descriptions. To realize the potential for continuous diffusion generation, an enhanced latent-space diffusion framework designed to elevate generation capabilities across two dimensions, namely, distribution approximation and semantic alignment, is proposed. Specifically, a latent-space adversarial discriminator is incorporated. By applying decoupled adversarial supervision, this component mitigates the detail loss caused by mean regression, significantly enhancing the physical realism and dynamic sharpness. Concurrently, a latent-space contrastive alignment strategy is introduced during the denoising process that reinforces the correspondence of the generated motion sequences with the given textual inputs via explicit cross-modal constraints. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the limitations of conventional diffusion models, thus validating the potential of continuous diffusion frameworks within the domain of text-driven motion synthesis.
Zhaowu Li, Rui Liu, Deheng Zhu et al.· Visual Computing for Industr...· 0 citations
Video motion transfer aims to animate a target object using dynamics from a reference video. Existing formulations largely rely on fixed structural correspondence, which becomes ill-defined when reference and target objects differ substantially in morphology, articulation, or deformation mechanisms. We introduce Motion Beyond Morphology, a perspective that seeks to transfer motion beyond fixed structural correspondence, by preserving dynamics that remain meaningful across different target morphologies. To realize this, we propose a two-stage framework. Stage~I learns complementary multi-granularity abstract motion views and uses them to bootstrap cross-category video pairs that preserve transferable dynamics across diverse morphologies. Stage~II internalizes this supervision into direct reference-video-conditioned generation, removing the need for explicit motion extraction at inference. We further introduce OpenVMT-Dataset and OpenVMT-Bench for training and evaluating image- and text-conditioned motion transfer across Same, Near, and Far category gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art motion fidelity and target preservation. Project page: https://miniz233.github.io/MotionBeyondMorphology/
Zhixue Fang, Zhimin Zhang, Bi'an Du et al.· 0 citations
Text-to-motion generation must produce motions that are semantically correct, temporally coherent, and physically plausible. A natural approach is to first project motion data into a structured semantic space and then train a generative model within that space. Such a paradigm has been highly successful in image generation through Representation Autoencoders (RAEs), where a frozen self-supervised encoder provides semantic features for diffusion or flow models to learn from. However, direct transfer of such a paradigm to motion space using Motion-JEPA as the frozen encoder fails dramatically. We diagnose this failure geometrically and identify two motion-specific bottlenecks: (1) the JEPA feature space is spectrally ill-conditioned, making the Gaussian-to-data transport unstable; and (2) even with a well-conditioned spectrum, flow residuals tend to align with decoder-sensitive directions, where small latent errors are amplified into large motion artifacts after decoding. Based on these insights, we propose MoRAE. MoRAE addresses the two bottlenecks separately. A compact bottleneck distills the structured JEPA representation while removing weak and redundant directions, bringing the latent spectrum into a transport-stable regime. Motion-coupled training then aligns the retained latent geometry with the decoder, making characteristic flow errors less costly after decoding. With this flow-friendly latent, a standard non-autoregressive Flow-Matching DiT achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Yifei Zhu, Mingyi Shi, Yangyang Cai et al.· 0 citations
Diffusion-based text-to-motion models synthesize realistic human motions but often exhibit semantic drift from the input text. Motion is inherently temporal, especially in compositional and long-duration sequences that require semantic consistency across multiple action segments and smooth kinematic transitions throughout the trajectory. We posit that the initial noise is central to this consistency: within the Gaussian noise space, certain instances, i.e. winning noise tickets, carry latent structure that biases denoising toward particular motion semantics, even under null prompts. We propose WInning Noise Retrieval and Optimization (WINRO), a training-free, model-agnostic framework that improves text-motion alignment by selecting and refining such tickets before diffusion sampling. WINRO maps random noises to motion features generated under null prompts, retrieves the best-aligned noise for a given text, and refines it via a KL-regularized objective that reduces the residual semantic gap while preserving the Gaussian prior. An optional LoRA-based adapter amortizes this refinement into a single forward pass. WINRO consistently improves text-motion fidelity across different base models, MDM and MotionLCM, on HumanML3D without retraining, improves temporal robustness on the MTT benchmark, and generalizes to applications such as motion stylization and spatial constraint satisfaction.
Sakuya Ota, Qing Yu, Kent Fujiwara et al.· 0 citations
Generation in video diffusion or flow models is computationally expensive due to the slow and iterative sampling process. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) acceleration methods heavily rely on variational score distillation (VSD) and adversarial losses to distill diffusion models into few-step generators. Albeit achieving high-quality video generation, these training losses are notoriously hard to optimize and suffer from mode collapse, leading to loss of video diversity and lack of motion. In this paper, we introduce Parallel Decoding Distillation (PDD), a simplified and scalable trajectory-based distillation method for fast inference of diffusion and flow matching models. Our architecture and training procedure are compatible with any pre-trained model and support sampling with a varying number of function evaluations (NFE). PDD accelerates generation by predicting multiple denoising steps per network evaluation. Conceptually, it learns a representation of the mean velocity without regressing its derivative using JVPs or finite-difference approximations. Our method achieves SOTA performance with 4-8 NFE on LTX-2.3 Text-to-Video/Audio, Wan 14B Text-to-Video, and Qwen-Image Text-to-Image. Moreover, PDD presents a significant improvement in generated video diversity.
Neta Shaul, Chao Liu, Arash Vahdat et al.· 0 citations
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
