Aug 2026· Computer graphics forum (Print)· 0 citations· 21 references
TL;DR
This work introduces stylized phase manifolds—a compact, interpretable latent representation that disentangles motion content, the temporal structure, and style and develops a diffusion‐based motion generator that enables fine‐grained control over semantic, temporal, and stylistic aspects of motion.
Abstract
We introduce stylized phase manifolds—a compact, interpretable latent representation that disentangles motion content (e.g. “jumping”, “walking”), the temporal structure (e.g. motion cycle frequency, gait timing), and style (i.e. how the motion is performed). Learned in an unsupervised manner and inherently low‐dimensional, the manifold offers intuitive and flexible editing. Building on this representation, we develop a diffusion‐based motion generator that enables fine‐grained control over semantic, temporal, and stylistic aspects of motion. To connect high‐level intent with low‐level motion, we treat the stylized manifold as an intermediate representation—a structured bridge between natural language and motion. By first mapping text into this manifold, our two‐stage pipeline improves the control over for text‐based motion generation, while producing high‐quality, diverse motion outputs.
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
Bowen Zheng, Linjun Wu, Xinwei Jiang et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
ARDY is introduced, a streaming generation framework that bridges this gap by enabling high-fidelity motion generation controllable via online text prompts and flexible kinematic constraints and balancing precise trajectory control with efficient generative learning.
Kaifeng Zhao, Mathis Petrovich, Haotian Zhang et al.· ACM Transactions on Graphics· 2 citations
ACT is introduced, a unified generative framework that reformulates rigging and animation not as independent tasks, but as complementary views of a single hyper-kinematic process, offering a versatile and efficient solution for automating 3D character animation.
Pengyu Long, Weirui Wang, Qingcheng Zhao et al.· ACM Transactions on Graphics· 0 citations
Text-driven human motion synthesis has made substantial development with two core modules of motion representation and generative architecture. For representation, Vector Quantization (VQ)-based methods compress motion data into discrete tokens while latent-based models operate directly in continuous space. However, both of these representations exhibit significant limitations. VQ-based methods suffer from inherent information loss, which compromises the quality, diversity, and generalization of generated motions, while continuous representation on holistic whole-body motion hinders part-level flexibility. For architecture, diffusion and autoregressive diffusion models have demonstrated their superiority, yet the fine-grained controllability over individual body parts is also limited. Thus, we propose a unified spatiotemporally decoupled framework named DeMoDiff, which jointly redesigns representation and architecture. To enhance representation extraction capabilities and offer greater part-level controllability, we present a spatial-temporal VAE that encodes each body joint rather than compressing the whole-body motion into a single latent space. Then, we incorporate spatial-temporal masking and attention mechanisms into an autoregressive diffusion generator, achieving both generative capability and controllable editability. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and compelling motion generation results. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong temporal and spatial editing capabilities, further validating its effectiveness. Our project page: https://rex0191.github.io/DeMoDiff/
Chengqun Yang, Liang Xu, Yanping Li et al.· 0 citations
Generating motion sequences conforming to a target style while adhering to the given content prompts requires accommodating both the content and style. In existing methods, the information usually only flows from style to content, which may cause conflict between the style and content, harming the integration. Differently, in this work we build a bidirectional control flow between the style and the content, also adjusting the style towards the content, in which case the style-content collision is alleviated and the dynamics of the style is better preserved in the integration. Moreover, we extend the stylized motion generation from one modality, i.e. the style motion, to multiple modalities including texts and images through contrastive learning, leading to flexible style control on the motion generation. To further boost the performance, we advance the motion diffusion to motion-aligned temporal latent diffusion by developing a novel motion VAE. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods across different datasets, while also enabling multimodal signals control. The code of our method will be made publicly available.
Zhe Li, Yisheng He, Lei Zhong et al.· IEEE Transactions on Image P...· 17 citations· ⚡2
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