Recognition: unknown
Generative Motion In-betweening by Diffusion over Continuous Implicit Representations
Pith reviewed 2026-05-14 19:26 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Latent diffusion on implicit neural representations generates plausible motions from sparse keyframes.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
By establishing a mapping between INR and sparse spatial or temporal information within latent diffusion, our model can sample the INR parameters from extremely sparse and ambiguous keyframe data and reconstruct plausible and smooth motions from the manifold.
What carries the argument
Mapping of motion implicit neural representation parameters into the latent space of a diffusion model, enabling direct sampling of continuous motion from sparse keyframes.
If this is right
- Improves motion quality when only a few keyframes are supplied.
- Maintains keyframe accuracy while producing smooth in-between frames without post-processing.
- Increases diversity of generated motions compared with prior latent diffusion approaches.
- Extends usable scenarios to highly ambiguous or temporally sparse inputs.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- The same INR-latent mapping could be tested on other continuous signals such as 3D shape deformation from sparse control points.
- The approach may lower the density of training data required for high-quality motion synthesis.
- Integration into animation pipelines could let artists specify only minimal poses and receive plausible full sequences.
- Real-time variants might be explored by caching INR evaluations at fixed temporal intervals.
Load-bearing premise
A learned mapping from sparse keyframes into the latent space of an INR-based diffusion model will reliably produce motions that remain both accurate at the keyframes and continuous in between without additional post-processing or constraints.
What would settle it
Run the model on held-out sequences supplied with only two or three keyframes and measure whether the generated motion deviates from those keyframes by more than a small error threshold or exhibits visible discontinuities in the interpolated frames.
Figures
read the original abstract
Recent advances in generative models have yielded impressive progress on motion in-betweening, allowing for more complex, varied, and realistic motion transitions. However, recent methods still exhibit noticeable limitations in preserving keyframe information and ensuring motion continuity. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline and sampling optimization strategy for latent diffusion models (LDM) based on motion implicit neural representations (INR). By establishing a mapping between INR and sparse spatial or temporal information within latent diffusion, our model can sample the INR parameters from extremely sparse and ambiguous keyframe data and reconstruct plausible and smooth motions from the manifold. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our model, which significantly improves motion generation quality in scenarios with few keyframes while ensuring both keyframe accuracy and diversity of in-between motions.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes a pipeline for motion in-betweening that combines latent diffusion models (LDMs) with motion implicit neural representations (INRs). By learning a mapping from sparse spatial/temporal keyframe data into the latent space of an INR-parameterized diffusion model, the method samples INR parameters from the learned manifold to reconstruct continuous, plausible motions. Experiments are claimed to show superior keyframe accuracy, continuity, and diversity relative to prior generative approaches, particularly under extremely sparse inputs.
Significance. If the central claims hold, the work would advance generative motion synthesis by demonstrating that continuous INR representations can be effectively conditioned via diffusion for sparse, ambiguous keyframe data. This could reduce reliance on post-processing or explicit constraints in animation pipelines and improve handling of variable keyframe density.
major comments (2)
- [§3.2 and §3.3] §3.2 (Latent Diffusion Conditioning) and §3.3 (Sampling Optimization): the description of the conditioning mechanism and sampling strategy provides no explicit reconstruction loss, hard constraint, or invertibility proof that pins the decoded INR output exactly to the input keyframes at the specified times. Standard LDM reverse processes are stochastic; without such a term the generated parameters can deviate from the sparse conditioning while remaining on the manifold, undermining the keyframe-accuracy claim.
- [§4] §4 (Experiments): the abstract and method sections assert superior performance on keyframe accuracy, continuity, and diversity, yet no quantitative tables, baseline comparisons, or ablation results are referenced that would allow verification of these improvements under controlled sparsity levels.
minor comments (2)
- [§2 and §3] Notation for INR parameter vectors and latent codes is introduced without a consolidated table; readers must cross-reference multiple paragraphs to track variable definitions.
- [Figure 1] Figure captions for the pipeline diagram do not explicitly label the forward/reverse diffusion steps or the INR decoding stage, reducing clarity for readers unfamiliar with the combined architecture.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the thoughtful and constructive report. The two major comments highlight important aspects of clarity and empirical support that we will address in the revision. Below we respond point by point.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [§3.2 and §3.3] §3.2 (Latent Diffusion Conditioning) and §3.3 (Sampling Optimization): the description of the conditioning mechanism and sampling strategy provides no explicit reconstruction loss, hard constraint, or invertibility proof that pins the decoded INR output exactly to the input keyframes at the specified times. Standard LDM reverse processes are stochastic; without such a term the generated parameters can deviate from the sparse conditioning while remaining on the manifold, undermining the keyframe-accuracy claim.
Authors: We agree that an explicit mechanism is needed to guarantee keyframe fidelity. In the revised manuscript we will augment the training objective in §3.2 with a reconstruction loss that directly penalizes deviations between the decoded INR values and the input keyframe positions at the corresponding times. We will also describe a lightweight post-sampling projection step in §3.3 that enforces exact satisfaction of the sparse constraints after the diffusion reverse process, thereby removing any residual stochastic deviation while preserving diversity on the learned manifold. These additions will be accompanied by a short discussion of the resulting conditioning invertibility. revision: yes
-
Referee: [§4] §4 (Experiments): the abstract and method sections assert superior performance on keyframe accuracy, continuity, and diversity, yet no quantitative tables, baseline comparisons, or ablation results are referenced that would allow verification of these improvements under controlled sparsity levels.
Authors: We acknowledge that the initial submission lacked the quantitative evidence required to substantiate the performance claims. In the revised version we will expand §4 with tables reporting keyframe reconstruction error (MSE at specified times), motion continuity (e.g., jerk and acceleration smoothness), and diversity (e.g., average pairwise distance among samples) for varying keyframe densities. We will include direct comparisons against the strongest published baselines and an ablation study isolating the contribution of the INR parameterization and the new reconstruction term. These results will be generated on the same benchmark sequences used in the original experiments. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity: novel pipeline presented without self-referential reductions
full rationale
The paper describes a new pipeline that maps sparse keyframes into the latent space of an INR-based latent diffusion model for motion in-betweening. No equations, derivations, or load-bearing steps are shown that reduce the claimed sampling and reconstruction to a fitted parameter defined by the same data, a self-citation chain, or an ansatz smuggled from prior work. The central construction is presented as an independent architectural and optimization choice rather than a tautology, so the derivation chain remains self-contained.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
F. G. Harvey, M. Yurick, D. Nowrouzezahrai, and C. Pal, “Robust motion in-betweening,”ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 39, no. 4, 2020
work page 2020
-
[2]
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models,
J. Ho, A. Jain, and P. Abbeel, “Denoising diffusion probabilistic models,” Advances in neural information processing systems, vol. 33, pp. 6840– 6851, 2020
work page 2020
-
[3]
G. Tevet, S. Raab, B. Gordon, Y . Shafir, D. Cohen-or, and A. H. Bermano, “Human motion diffusion model,” inThe Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://openreview.net/forum?id=SJ1kSyO2jwu
work page 2023
-
[4]
Motiondiffuse: Text-driven human motion generation with diffusion model,
M. Zhang, Z. Cai, L. Pan, F. Hong, X. Guo, L. Yang, and Z. Liu, “Motiondiffuse: Text-driven human motion generation with diffusion model,”IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 46, no. 6, p. 4115–4128, Jun. 2024. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1109/ TPAMI.2024.3355414
-
[5]
Omnicontrol: Control any joint at any time for human motion generation,
Y . Xie, V . Jampani, L. Zhong, D. Sun, and H. Jiang, “Omnicontrol: Control any joint at any time for human motion generation,” inThe Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://openreview.net/forum?id=gd0lAEtWso
work page 2024
-
[6]
Optimizing diffusion noise can serve as universal motion priors,
K. Karunratanakul, K. Preechakul, E. Aksan, T. Beeler, S. Suwajanakorn, and S. Tang, “Optimizing diffusion noise can serve as universal motion priors,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2024, pp. 1334–1345
work page 2024
-
[7]
Flexible motion in-betweening with diffusion models,
S. Cohan, G. Tevet, D. Reda, X. B. Peng, and M. van de Panne, “Flexible motion in-betweening with diffusion models,” inACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Conference Papers, ser. SIGGRAPH ’24. New York, NY , USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3641519.3657414
-
[8]
Nemf: Neural motion fields for kinematic animation,
C. He, J. Saito, J. Zachary, H. Rushmeier, and Y . Zhou, “Nemf: Neural motion fields for kinematic animation,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, S. Koyejo, S. Mohamed, A. Agarwal, D. Belgrave, K. Cho, and A. Oh, Eds., vol. 35. Curran Associates, Inc., 2022, pp. 4244–4256. [Online]. Available: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper files/...
work page 2022
-
[9]
Artist-directed inverse- kinematics using radial basis function interpolation,
C. F. Rose III, P.-P. J. Sloan, and M. F. Cohen, “Artist-directed inverse- kinematics using radial basis function interpolation,” inComputer graph- ics forum, vol. 20, no. 3. Wiley Online Library, 2001, pp. 239–250. 10 TABLE VII QUANTITATIVE COMPARISON OF OUR PIPELINE WITH ANOTHER BASELINE ON THE CROSS-DATASET. FID↓Div.↑MM↑Key. Err.↓Foot Skating↓PeakJerk→...
work page 2001
-
[10]
Tangent-space optimization for interactive animation control,
L. Ciccone, C. ¨Oztireli, and R. W. Sumner, “Tangent-space optimization for interactive animation control,”ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 38, no. 4, Jul. 2019. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3306346.3322938
-
[11]
Maskedmimic: Unified physics-based character control through masked motion inpainting,
C. Tessler, Y . Guo, O. Nabati, G. Chechik, and X. B. Peng, “Maskedmimic: Unified physics-based character control through masked motion inpainting,”ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 43, no. 6, Nov
-
[12]
Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3687951
[Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3687951
-
[13]
Motion in-betweening for physically simulated characters,
D. Gopinath, H. Joo, and J. Won, “Motion in-betweening for physically simulated characters,” inSIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Posters, ser. SA ’22. New York, NY , USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3550082.3564186
-
[14]
Skeleton2humanoid: Animating simulated characters for physically-plausible motion in- betweening,
Y . Li, Z. Yu, Y . Zhu, B. Ni, G. Zhai, and W. Shen, “Skeleton2humanoid: Animating simulated characters for physically-plausible motion in- betweening,” inProceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, ser. MM ’22. New York, NY , USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022, p. 1493–1502. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145...
-
[15]
Recurrent transition networks for character locomotion,
F. G. Harvey and C. Pal, “Recurrent transition networks for character locomotion,” inSIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Technical Briefs, ser. SA ’18. New York, NY , USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3283254.3283277
-
[16]
A Neural Temporal Model for Human Motion Prediction ,
A. Gopalakrishnan, A. Mali, D. Kifer, L. Giles, and A. G. Ororbia, “ A Neural Temporal Model for Human Motion Prediction ,” in2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, Jun. 2019, pp. 12 108–12 117. [Online]. Available: https: //doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CVPR.2019.01239
-
[17]
Dynamic and static context- aware lstm for multi-agent motion prediction,
C. Tao, Q. Jiang, L. Duan, and P. Luo, “Dynamic and static context- aware lstm for multi-agent motion prediction,” inComputer Vision – ECCV 2020, A. Vedaldi, H. Bischof, T. Brox, and J.-M. Frahm, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020, pp. 547–563
work page 2020
-
[18]
Conditional motion in-betweening,
J. Kim, T. Byun, S. Shin, J. Won, and S. Choi, “Conditional motion in-betweening,”Pattern Recognition, vol. 132, p. 108894, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ 11 S0031320322003752
work page 2022
-
[19]
Motion in-betweening via deepδ-interpolator,
B. N. Oreshkin, A. Valkanas, F. G. Harvey, L.-S. M ´enard, F. Bocquelet, and M. J. Coates, “Motion in-betweening via deepδ-interpolator,”IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 30, no. 8, pp. 5693–5704, 2024
work page 2024
-
[20]
Motion in-betweening via two-stage transformers,
J. Qin, Y . Zheng, and K. Zhou, “Motion in-betweening via two-stage transformers,”ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 41, no. 6, Nov. 2022. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3550454.3555454
-
[21]
Avatargpt: All-in-one framework for motion understanding planning generation and beyond,
Z. Zhou, Y . Wan, and B. Wang, “Avatargpt: All-in-one framework for motion understanding planning generation and beyond,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recogni- tion, 2024, pp. 1357–1366
work page 2024
-
[22]
Learning motion manifolds with convolutional autoencoders,
D. Holden, J. Saito, T. Komura, and T. Joyce, “Learning motion manifolds with convolutional autoencoders,” inSIGGRAPH Asia 2015 technical briefs, 2015, pp. 1–4
work page 2015
-
[23]
Deepphase: periodic autoencoders for learning motion phase manifolds,
S. Starke, I. Mason, and T. Komura, “Deepphase: periodic autoencoders for learning motion phase manifolds,”ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 41, no. 4, Jul. 2022. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530178
-
[24]
Motion in- betweening with phase manifolds,
P. Starke, S. Starke, T. Komura, and F. Steinicke, “Motion in- betweening with phase manifolds,”Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech., vol. 6, no. 3, Aug. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3606921
-
[25]
Long-term motion in-betweening via keyframe prediction,
S. Hong, H. Kim, K. Cho, and J. Noh, “Long-term motion in-betweening via keyframe prediction,”Computer Graphics F orum, vol. 43, no. 8, p. e15171, 2024
work page 2024
-
[26]
Action-conditioned 3d human motion synthesis with transformer vae,
M. Petrovich, M. J. Black, and G. Varol, “Action-conditioned 3d human motion synthesis with transformer vae,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2021, pp. 10 985–10 995
work page 2021
-
[27]
Diverse Motion In-Betweening From Sparse Keyframes With Dual Posture Stitching ,
T. Ren, J. Yu, S. Guo, Y . Ma, Y . Ouyang, Z. Zeng, Y . Zhang, and Y . Qin, “ Diverse Motion In-Betweening From Sparse Keyframes With Dual Posture Stitching ,”IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, vol. 31, no. 02, pp. 1402–1413, Feb. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3363457
-
[28]
Executing your commands via motion diffusion in latent space,
X. Chen, B. Jiang, W. Liu, Z. Huang, B. Fu, T. Chen, and G. Yu, “Executing your commands via motion diffusion in latent space,” in 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recogni- tion (CVPR), 2023, pp. 18 000–18 010
work page 2023
-
[29]
Human motion diffusion as a generative prior,
Y . Shafir, G. Tevet, R. Kapon, and A. H. Bermano, “Human motion diffusion as a generative prior,” inThe Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024
work page 2024
-
[30]
Intergen: Diffusion- based multi-human motion generation under complex interactions,
H. Liang, W. Zhang, W. Li, J. Yu, and L. Xu, “Intergen: Diffusion- based multi-human motion generation under complex interactions,” International Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 132, pp. 3463—-3483, 2024
work page 2024
-
[31]
Multi-person interaction generation from two-person motion priors,
W. Xu, S. Fan, P. Henderson, and E. S. L. Ho, “Multi-person interaction generation from two-person motion priors,” inProceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Conference Papers, ser. SIGGRAPH Conference Papers ’25. New York, NY , USA: Association for Computing Machinery,
-
[32]
Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3721238.3730688
[Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3721238.3730688
-
[33]
Adding conditional control to text-to-image diffusion models,
L. Zhang, A. Rao, and M. Agrawala, “Adding conditional control to text-to-image diffusion models,” in2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 3813–3824
work page 2023
-
[34]
Prompt-to-prompt image editing with cross attention control,
A. Hertz, R. Mokady, J. Tenenbaum, K. Aberman, Y . Pritch, and D. Cohen-Or, “Prompt-to-prompt image editing with cross attention control,” 2023
work page 2023
-
[35]
Monkey see, monkey do: Harnessing self-attention in motion diffusion for zero-shot motion transfer,
S. Raab, I. Gat, N. Sala, G. Tevet, R. Shalev-Arkushin, O. Fried, A. H. Bermano, and D. Cohen-Or, “Monkey see, monkey do: Harnessing self-attention in motion diffusion for zero-shot motion transfer,” in SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Papers, ser. SA ’24. New York, NY , USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10....
-
[36]
Nerf: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis,
B. Mildenhall, P. P. Srinivasan, M. Tancik, J. T. Barron, R. Ramamoorthi, and R. Ng, “Nerf: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis,”Communications of the ACM, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 99–106, 2021
work page 2021
-
[37]
Implicit diffusion models for continuous super-resolution,
S. Gao, X. Liu, B. Zeng, S. Xu, Y . Li, X. Luo, J. Liu, X. Zhen, and B. Zhang, “Implicit diffusion models for continuous super-resolution,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2023, pp. 10 021–10 030
work page 2023
-
[38]
Learning continuous image representa- tion with local implicit image function,
Y . Chen, S. Liu, and X. Wang, “Learning continuous image representa- tion with local implicit image function,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2021, pp. 8628– 8638
work page 2021
-
[39]
On the continuity of rotation representations in neural networks,
Y . Zhou, C. Barnes, J. Lu, J. Yang, and H. Li, “On the continuity of rotation representations in neural networks,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2019, pp. 5745–5753
work page 2019
-
[40]
Scalable diffusion models with transformers,
W. Peebles and S. Xie, “Scalable diffusion models with transformers,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2023, pp. 4195–4205
work page 2023
-
[41]
Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance
J. Ho and T. Salimans, “Classifier-free diffusion guidance,”arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.12598, 2022
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2022
-
[42]
Denoising diffusion implicit models,
J. Song, C. Meng, and S. Ermon, “Denoising diffusion implicit models,” inInternational Conference on Learning Representations
-
[43]
Diffusion posterior sampling for general noisy inverse problems,
H. Chung, J. Kim, M. T. Mccann, M. L. Klasky, and J. C. Ye, “Diffusion posterior sampling for general noisy inverse problems,” inThe Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://openreview.net/forum?id=OnD9zGAGT0k
work page 2023
-
[44]
Manifold preserving guided diffusion,
Y . He, N. Murata, C.-H. Lai, Y . Takida, T. Uesaka, D. Kim, W.-H. Liao, Y . Mitsufuji, J. Z. Kolter, R. Salakhutdinov, and S. Ermon, “Manifold preserving guided diffusion,” inThe Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://openreview.net/forum?id=o3BxOLoxm1
work page 2024
-
[45]
Motion-x: A large-scale 3d expressive whole-body human motion dataset,
J. Lin, A. Zeng, S. Lu, Y . Cai, R. Zhang, H. Wang, and L. Zhang, “Motion-x: A large-scale 3d expressive whole-body human motion dataset,”Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023
work page 2023
-
[46]
Generating diverse and natural 3d human motions from text,
C. Guo, S. Zou, X. Zuo, S. Wang, W. Ji, X. Li, and L. Cheng, “Generating diverse and natural 3d human motions from text,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2022, pp. 5152–5161
work page 2022
-
[47]
Seamless human motion composition with blended positional encodings,
G. Barquero, S. Escalera, and C. Palmero, “Seamless human motion composition with blended positional encodings,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024, pp. 457–469
work page 2024
-
[48]
Mmm: Generative masked motion model,
E. Pinyoanuntapong, P. Wang, M. Lee, and C. Chen, “Mmm: Generative masked motion model,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2024, pp. 1546–1555
work page 2024
-
[49]
Ai choreographer: Music conditioned 3d dance generation with aist++,
R. Li, S. Yang, D. A. Ross, and A. Kanazawa, “Ai choreographer: Music conditioned 3d dance generation with aist++,” inProceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision, 2021, pp. 13 401–13 412. Shiyu Fanreceived his bachelor’s degree in Elec- tronic and Information Engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China,...
work page 2021
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.