Abdul Ahad Butt

Yangsong Zhang, Anujith Muraleedharan, Rikhat Akizhanov et al.

Recent progress in text-conditioned human motion generation has been largely driven by diffusion models trained on large-scale human motion data. Building on this progress, recent methods attempt to transfer such models for character animation and real robot control by applying a Whole-Body Controller (WBC) that converts diffusion-generated motions into executable trajectories. While WBC trajectories become compliant with physics, they may expose substantial deviations from original motion. To address this issue, we here propose PhysMoDPO, a Direct Preference Optimization framework. Unlike prior work that relies on hand-crafted physics-aware heuristics such as foot-sliding penalties, we integrate WBC into our training pipeline and optimize diffusion model such that the output of WBC becomes compliant both with physics and original text instructions. To train PhysMoDPO we deploy physics-based and task-specific rewards and use them to assign preference to synthesized trajectories. Our extensive experiments on text-to-motion and spatial control tasks demonstrate consistent improvements of PhysMoDPO in both physical realism and task-related metrics on simulated robots. Moreover, we demonstrate that PhysMoDPO results in significant improvements when applied to zero-shot motion transfer in simulation and for real-world deployment on a G1 humanoid robot.

Yangsong Zhang, Abdul Ahad Butt, Gül Varol et al.

Human motion generation has shown great advances thanks to the recent diffusion models trained on large-scale motion capture data. Most of existing works, however, currently target animation of isolated people in empty scenes. Meanwhile, synthesizing realistic human-object interactions in complex 3D scenes remains a critical challenge in computer graphics and robotics. One obstacle towards generating versatile high-fidelity human-object interactions is the lack of large-scale datasets with diverse object manipulations. Indeed, existing motion capture data is typically restricted to single people and manipulations of limited sets of objects. To address this issue, we propose an automatic motion extraction pipeline and use it to collect interaction-rich human motions. Our new dataset InterPose contains 73.8K sequences of 3D human motions and corresponding text captions automatically obtained from 45.8K videos with human-object interactions. We perform extensive experiments and demonstrate InterPose to bring significant improvements to state-of-the-art methods for human motion generation. Moreover, using InterPose we develop an LLM-based agent enabling zero-shot animation of people interacting with diverse objects and scenes.