Purposer: Putting Human Motion Generation in Context

TL;DR

Purposer is a flexible neural method for human motion generation in 3D scenes, capable of integrating various contextual signals to produce diverse, realistic motion sequences without extensive scene-specific training.

Contribution

It introduces a novel neural discrete representation learning approach that effectively combines multiple contextual cues for human motion synthesis in complex scenes.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in quality and diversity

Can generate long, context-aware motion sequences

Utilizes open access datasets for training

Abstract

We present a novel method to generate human motion to populate 3D indoor scenes. It can be controlled with various combinations of conditioning signals such as a path in a scene, target poses, past motions, and scenes represented as 3D point clouds. State-of-the-art methods are either models specialized to one single setting, require vast amounts of high-quality and diverse training data, or are unconditional models that do not integrate scene or other contextual information. As a consequence, they have limited applicability and rely on costly training data. To address these limitations, we propose a new method ,dubbed Purposer, based on neural discrete representation learning. Our model is capable of exploiting, in a flexible manner, different types of information already present in open access large-scale datasets such as AMASS. First, we encode unconditional human motion into a discrete latent space. Second, an autoregressive generative model, conditioned with key contextual information, either with prompting or additive tokens, and trained for next-step prediction in this space, synthesizes sequences of latent indices. We further design a novel conditioning block to handle future conditioning information in such a causal model by using a network with two branches to compute separate stacks of features. In this manner, Purposer can generate realistic motion sequences in diverse test scenes. Through exhaustive evaluation, we demonstrate that our multi-contextual solution outperforms existing specialized approaches for specific contextual information, both in terms of quality and diversity. Our model is trained with short sequences, but a byproduct of being able to use various conditioning signals is that at test time different combinations can be used to chain short sequences together and generate long motions within a context scene.