QuaMo: Quaternion Motions for Vision-based 3D Human Kinematics Capture

Vision-based 3D human motion capture from videos remains a challenge in computer vision. Traditional 3D pose estimation approaches often ignore the temporal consistency between frames, causing implausible and jittery motion. The emerging field of kinematics-based 3D motion capture addresses these issues by estimating the temporal transitioning between poses instead. A major drawback in current kinematics approaches is their reliance on Euler angles. Despite their simplicity, Euler angles suffer from discontinuity that leads to unstable motion reconstructions, especially in online settings where trajectory refinement is unavailable. Contrarily, quaternions have no discontinuity and can produce continuous transitions between poses. In this paper, we propose QuaMo, a novel Quaternion Motions method using quaternion differential equations (QDE) for human kinematics capture. We utilize the state-space model, an effective system for describing real-time kinematics estimations, with quaternion state and the QDE describing quaternion velocity. The corresponding angular acceleration is computed from a meta-PD controller with a novel acceleration enhancement that adaptively regulates the control signals as the human quickly changes to a new pose. Unlike previous work, our QDE is solved under the quaternion unit-sphere constraint that results in more accurate estimations. Experimental results show that our novel formulation of the QDE with acceleration enhancement accurately estimates 3D human kinematics with no discontinuity and minimal implausibilities. QuaMo outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets, namely Human3.6M, Fit3D, SportsPose and AIST. The code is available at https://github.com/cuongle1206/QuaMo

The CMU-AIST submission for the ICME 2025 Audio Encoder Challenge

This technical report describes our submission to the ICME 2025 audio encoder challenge. Our submitted system is built on BEATs, a masked speech token prediction based audio encoder. We extend the BEATs model using 74,000 hours of data derived from various speech, music, and sound corpora and scale its architecture upto 300 million parameters. We experiment with speech-heavy and balanced pre-training mixtures to study the impact of different domains on final performance. Our submitted system consists of an ensemble of the Dasheng 1.2 billion model with two custom scaled-up BEATs models trained on the aforementioned pre-training data mixtures. We also propose a simple ensembling technique that retains the best capabilities of constituent models and surpasses both the baseline and Dasheng 1.2B. For open science, we publicly release our trained checkpoints via huggingface at https://huggingface.co/shikhar7ssu/OpenBEATs-ICME-SOUND and https://huggingface.co/shikhar7ssu/OpenBEATs-ICME.

Reframing Music-Driven 2D Dance Pose Generation as Multi-Channel Image Generation

Recent pose-to-video models can translate 2D pose sequences into photorealistic, identity-preserving dance videos, so the key challenge is to generate temporally coherent, rhythm-aligned 2D poses from music, especially under complex, high-variance in-the-wild distributions. We address this by reframing music-to-dance generation as a music-token-conditioned multi-channel image synthesis problem: 2D pose sequences are encoded as one-hot images, compressed by a pretrained image VAE, and modeled with a DiT-style backbone, allowing us to inherit architectural and training advances from modern text-to-image models and better capture high-variance 2D pose distributions. On top of this formulation, we introduce (i) a time-shared temporal indexing scheme that explicitly synchronizes music tokens and pose latents over time and (ii) a reference-pose conditioning strategy that preserves subject-specific body proportions and on-screen scale while enabling long-horizon segment-and-stitch generation. Experiments on a large in-the-wild 2D dance corpus and the calibrated AIST++2D benchmark show consistent improvements over representative music-to-dance methods in pose- and video-space metrics and human preference, and ablations validate the contributions of the representation, temporal indexing, and reference conditioning. See supplementary videos at https://hot-dance.github.io

DanceChat: Large Language Model-Guided Music-to-Dance Generation

Music-to-dance generation aims to synthesize human dance motion conditioned on musical input. Despite recent progress, significant challenges remain due to the semantic gap between music and dance motion, as music offers only abstract cues, such as melody, groove, and emotion, without explicitly specifying the physical movements. Moreover, a single piece of music can produce multiple plausible dance interpretations. This one-to-many mapping demands additional guidance, as music alone provides limited information for generating diverse dance movements. The challenge is further amplified by the scarcity of paired music and dance data, which restricts the model\^a\u{A}\'Zs ability to learn diverse dance patterns. In this paper, we introduce DanceChat, a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided music-to-dance generation approach. We use an LLM as a choreographer that provides textual motion instructions, offering explicit, high-level guidance for dance generation. This approach goes beyond implicit learning from music alone, enabling the model to generate dance that is both more diverse and better aligned with musical styles. Our approach consists of three components: (1) an LLM-based pseudo instruction generation module that produces textual dance guidance based on music style and structure, (2) a multi-modal feature extraction and fusion module that integrates music, rhythm, and textual guidance into a shared representation, and (3) a diffusion-based motion synthesis module together with a multi-modal alignment loss, which ensures that the generated dance is aligned with both musical and textual cues. Extensive experiments on AIST++ and human evaluations show that DanceChat outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

MEGADance: Mixture-of-Experts Architecture for Genre-Aware 3D Dance Generation

Music-driven 3D dance generation has attracted increasing attention in recent years, with promising applications in choreography, virtual reality, and creative content creation. Previous research has generated promising realistic dance movement from audio signals. However, traditional methods underutilize genre conditioning, often treating it as auxiliary modifiers rather than core semantic drivers. This oversight compromises music-motion synchronization and disrupts dance genre continuity, particularly during complex rhythmic transitions, thereby leading to visually unsatisfactory effects. To address the challenge, we propose MEGADance, a novel architecture for music-driven 3D dance generation. By decoupling choreographic consistency into dance generality and genre specificity, MEGADance demonstrates significant dance quality and strong genre controllability. It consists of two stages: (1) High-Fidelity Dance Quantization Stage (HFDQ), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) and reconstructs them with kinematic-dynamic constraints, and (2) Genre-Aware Dance Generation Stage (GADG), which maps music into the latent representation by synergistic utilization of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism with Mamba-Transformer hybrid backbone. Extensive experiments on the FineDance and AIST++ dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of MEGADance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code will be released upon acceptance.

AutoComPose: Automatic Generation of Pose Transition Descriptions for Composed Pose Retrieval Using Multimodal LLMs

Composed pose retrieval (CPR) enables users to search for human poses by specifying a reference pose and a transition description, but progress in this field is hindered by the scarcity and inconsistency of annotated pose transitions. Existing CPR datasets rely on costly human annotations or heuristic-based rule generation, both of which limit scalability and diversity. In this work, we introduce AutoComPose, the first framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to automatically generate rich and structured pose transition descriptions. Our method enhances annotation quality by structuring transitions into fine-grained body part movements and introducing mirrored/swapped variations, while a cyclic consistency constraint ensures logical coherence between forward and reverse transitions. To advance CPR research, we construct and release two dedicated benchmarks, AIST-CPR and PoseFixCPR, supplementing prior datasets with enhanced attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that training retrieval models with AutoComPose yields superior performance over human-annotated and heuristic-based methods, significantly reducing annotation costs while improving retrieval quality. Our work pioneers the automatic annotation of pose transitions, establishing a scalable foundation for future CPR research.

Enhancing Dance-to-Music Generation via Negative Conditioning Latent Diffusion Model

Conditional diffusion models have gained increasing attention since their impressive results for cross-modal synthesis, where the strong alignment between conditioning input and generated output can be achieved by training a time-conditioned U-Net augmented with cross-attention mechanism. In this paper, we focus on the problem of generating music synchronized with rhythmic visual cues of the given dance video. Considering that bi-directional guidance is more beneficial for training a diffusion model, we propose to enhance the quality of generated music and its synchronization with dance videos by adopting both positive rhythmic information and negative ones (PN-Diffusion) as conditions, where a dual diffusion and reverse processes is devised. Specifically, to train a sequential multi-modal U-Net structure, PN-Diffusion consists of a noise prediction objective for positive conditioning and an additional noise prediction objective for negative conditioning. To accurately define and select both positive and negative conditioning, we ingeniously utilize temporal correlations in dance videos, capturing positive and negative rhythmic cues by playing them forward and backward, respectively. Through subjective and objective evaluations of input-output correspondence in terms of dance-music beat alignment and the quality of generated music, experimental results on the AIST++ and TikTok dance video datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms SOTA dance-to-music generation models.

Motion Anything: Any to Motion Generation

Conditional motion generation has been extensively studied in computer vision, yet two critical challenges remain. First, while masked autoregressive methods have recently outperformed diffusion-based approaches, existing masking models lack a mechanism to prioritize dynamic frames and body parts based on given conditions. Second, existing methods for different conditioning modalities often fail to integrate multiple modalities effectively, limiting control and coherence in generated motion. To address these challenges, we propose Motion Anything, a multimodal motion generation framework that introduces an Attention-based Mask Modeling approach, enabling fine-grained spatial and temporal control over key frames and actions. Our model adaptively encodes multimodal conditions, including text and music, improving controllability. Additionally, we introduce Text-Motion-Dance (TMD), a new motion dataset consisting of 2,153 pairs of text, music, and dance, making it twice the size of AIST++, thereby filling a critical gap in the community. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Motion Anything surpasses state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks, achieving a 15% improvement in FID on HumanML3D and showing consistent performance gains on AIST++ and TMD. See our project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionAnything

GCDance: Genre-Controlled 3D Full Body Dance Generation Driven By Music

Generating high-quality full-body dance sequences from music is a challenging task as it requires strict adherence to genre-specific choreography. Moreover, the generated sequences must be both physically realistic and precisely synchronized with the beats and rhythm of the music. To overcome these challenges, we propose GCDance, a classifier-free diffusion framework for generating genre-specific dance motions conditioned on both music and textual prompts. Specifically, our approach extracts music features by combining high-level pre-trained music foundation model features with hand-crafted features for multi-granularity feature fusion. To achieve genre controllability, we leverage CLIP to efficiently embed genre-based textual prompt representations at each time step within our dance generation pipeline. Our GCDance framework can generate diverse dance styles from the same piece of music while ensuring coherence with the rhythm and melody of the music. Extensive experimental results obtained on the FineDance dataset demonstrate that GCDance significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches, which also achieve competitive results on the AIST++ dataset. Our ablation and inference time analysis demonstrate that GCDance provides an effective solution for high-quality music-driven dance generation.

LIFe-GoM: Generalizable Human Rendering with Learned Iterative Feedback Over Multi-Resolution Gaussians-on-Mesh

Generalizable rendering of an animatable human avatar from sparse inputs relies on data priors and inductive biases extracted from training on large data to avoid scene-specific optimization and to enable fast reconstruction. This raises two main challenges: First, unlike iterative gradient-based adjustment in scene-specific optimization, generalizable methods must reconstruct the human shape representation in a single pass at inference time. Second, rendering is preferably computationally efficient yet of high resolution. To address both challenges we augment the recently proposed dual shape representation, which combines the benefits of a mesh and Gaussian points, in two ways. To improve reconstruction, we propose an iterative feedback update framework, which successively improves the canonical human shape representation during reconstruction. To achieve computationally efficient yet high-resolution rendering, we study a coupled-multi-resolution Gaussians-on-Mesh representation. We evaluate the proposed approach on the challenging THuman2.0, XHuman and AIST++ data. Our approach reconstructs an animatable representation from sparse inputs in less than 1s, renders views with 95.1FPS at $1024 \times 1024$, and achieves PSNR/LPIPS*/FID of 24.65/110.82/51.27 on THuman2.0, outperforming the state-of-the-art in rendering quality.