History Repeats Itself: Human Motion Prediction via Motion Attention
This work addresses the problem of forecasting future human poses for applications like robotics and animation, offering an incremental improvement by explicitly modeling motion repetition.
The paper tackles human motion prediction by introducing an attention-based feed-forward network that leverages the observation that human motion tends to repeat itself, achieving state-of-the-art results on Human3.6M, AMASS, and 3DPW datasets.
Human motion prediction aims to forecast future human poses given a past motion. Whether based on recurrent or feed-forward neural networks, existing methods fail to model the observation that human motion tends to repeat itself, even for complex sports actions and cooking activities. Here, we introduce an attention-based feed-forward network that explicitly leverages this observation. In particular, instead of modeling frame-wise attention via pose similarity, we propose to extract motion attention to capture the similarity between the current motion context and the historical motion sub-sequences. Aggregating the relevant past motions and processing the result with a graph convolutional network allows us to effectively exploit motion patterns from the long-term history to predict the future poses. Our experiments on Human3.6M, AMASS and 3DPW evidence the benefits of our approach for both periodical and non-periodical actions. Thanks to our attention model, it yields state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/wei-mao-2019/HisRepItself.