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NEURAL MARIONETTE: A Transformer-based Multi-action Human Motion Synthesis System

Weiqiang Wang 1* , Xuefei Zhe 2* , Huan Chen 3 , Di Kang 2 , Tingguang Li 4 , Ruizhi Chen 1 , Linchao Bao 2
1LIESMARS, Wuhan University, 2Tencent AI Lab,
3Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, 4Tencent Robotics X
* Equal contribution
code[coming soon!] paper





walk_kick_run

Abstract

We present a neural network-based system for long-term, multi-action human motion synthesis. The system, dubbed as NEURAL MARIONETTE, can produce high-quality and meaningful motions with smooth transitions from simple user input, including a sequence of action tags with expected action duration, and optionally a hand-drawn moving trajectory if the user specifies. The core of our system is a novel Transformer based motion generation model, namely MARIONET, which can generate diverse motions given action tags. Different from existing motion generation models, MARIONET utilizes contextual information from the past motion clip and future action tag, dedicated to generating actions that can smoothly blend into historical and future actions. Specifically, MARIONET first encodes target action tag and contextual information into an action-level latent code. The code is unfolded into frame-level control signals via a time unrolling module, which could be then combined with other frame-level control signals like the target trajectory. Motion frames are then generated in an auto-regressive way. By sequentially applying MARIONET, the system NEURAL MARIONETTE can robustly generate long-term, multi-action motions with the help of two simple schemes, namely “Shadow Start” and “Action Revision”. Along with the novel system, we also present a new dataset dedicated to the multi-action motion synthesis task, which contains both action tags and their contextual information. Extensive experiments are conducted to study the action accuracy, naturalism, and transition smoothness of the motions generated by our system.

Supplementary Video