Controllable Motion Diffusion Model
Yi Shi Jingbo Wang Xuekun Jiang Bo Dai
Generating realistic and controllable motions for virtual characters is a
challenging task in computer animation, and its implications extend to games,
simulations, and virtual reality. Recent studies have drawn inspiration from
the success of diffusion models in image generation, demonstrating the
potential for addressing this task. However, the majority of these studies have
been limited to offline applications that target at sequence-level generation
that generates all steps simultaneously. To enable real-time motion synthesis
with diffusion models in response to time-varying control signals, we propose
the framework of the Controllable Motion Diffusion Model (COMODO). Our
framework begins with an auto-regressive motion diffusion model (A-MDM), which
generates motion sequences step by step. In this way, simply using the standard
DDPM algorithm without any additional complexity, our framework is able to
generate high-fidelity motion sequences over extended periods with different
types of control signals. Then, we propose our reinforcement learning-based
controller and controlling strategies on top of the A-MDM model, so that our
framework can steer the motion synthesis process across multiple tasks,
including target reaching, joystick-based control, goal-oriented control, and
trajectory following. The proposed framework enables the real-time generation
of diverse motions that react adaptively to user commands on-the-fly, thereby
enhancing the overall user experience. Besides, it is compatible with the
inpainting-based editing methods and can predict much more diverse motions
without additional fine-tuning of the basic motion generation models. We
conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our
framework in performing various tasks and compare its performance against
state-of-the-art methods.