UDE: A Unified Driving Engine for Human Motion Generation
This addresses the problem of labor-intensive motion generation for 3D avatars, offering a unified solution for multiple modalities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods like VQVAE and transformers.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating controllable and editable human motion sequences by proposing UDE, a unified driving engine that generates motion from natural language or audio, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like HumanML3D and AIST++.
Generating controllable and editable human motion sequences is a key challenge in 3D Avatar generation. It has been labor-intensive to generate and animate human motion for a long time until learning-based approaches have been developed and applied recently. However, these approaches are still task-specific or modality-specific\cite {ahuja2019language2pose}\cite{ghosh2021synthesis}\cite{ferreira2021learning}\cite{li2021ai}. In this paper, we propose ``UDE", the first unified driving engine that enables generating human motion sequences from natural language or audio sequences (see Fig.~\ref{fig:teaser}). Specifically, UDE consists of the following key components: 1) a motion quantization module based on VQVAE that represents continuous motion sequence as discrete latent code\cite{van2017neural}, 2) a modality-agnostic transformer encoder\cite{vaswani2017attention} that learns to map modality-aware driving signals to a joint space, and 3) a unified token transformer (GPT-like\cite{radford2019language}) network to predict the quantized latent code index in an auto-regressive manner. 4) a diffusion motion decoder that takes as input the motion tokens and decodes them into motion sequences with high diversity. We evaluate our method on HumanML3D\cite{Guo_2022_CVPR} and AIST++\cite{li2021learn} benchmarks, and the experiment results demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project website: \url{https://github.com/zixiangzhou916/UDE/