Controllable Long-term Motion Generation with Extended Joint Targets
This addresses the problem of fine-grained motion control and degradation over long sequences for interactive animation applications, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational breakthrough.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating stable and controllable character motion in real-time for computer animation, proposing COMET, an autoregressive framework that enables versatile control and robust long-horizon synthesis, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in complex motion control tasks.
Generating stable and controllable character motion in real-time is a key challenge in computer animation. Existing methods often fail to provide fine-grained control or suffer from motion degradation over long sequences, limiting their use in interactive applications. We propose COMET, an autoregressive framework that runs in real time, enabling versatile character control and robust long-horizon synthesis. Our efficient Transformer-based conditional VAE allows for precise, interactive control over arbitrary user-specified joints for tasks like goal-reaching and in-betweening from a single model. To ensure long-term temporal stability, we introduce a novel reference-guided feedback mechanism that prevents error accumulation. This mechanism also serves as a plug-and-play stylization module, enabling real-time style transfer. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that COMET robustly generates high-quality motion at real-time speeds, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in complex motion control tasks and confirming its readiness for demanding interactive applications.