We investigate a new task in human motion prediction, which aims to forecast future body poses from historically observed sequences while accounting for arbitrary latency. This differs from existing works that assume an ideal scenario where future motions can be "instantaneously" predicted, thereby neglecting time delays caused by network transmission and algorithm execution. Addressing this task requires tackling two key challenges: The length of latency period can vary significantly across samples; the prediction model must be efficient. In this paper, we propose ALIEN, which treats the motion as a continuous function parameterized by a neural network, enabling predictions under any latency condition. By incorporating Mamba-like linear attention as a hyper-network and designing subsequent low-rank modulation, ALIEN efficiently learns a set of implicit neural representation weights from the observed motion to encode instance-specific information. Additionally, our model integrates the primary motion prediction task with an extra-designed variable-delay pose reconstruction task in a unified multi-task learning framework, enhancing its ability to capture richer motion patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines adapted for our new task, while maintaining competitive performance in traditional prediction setting.

Making accurate prediction of human motions based on the historical observation is a crucial technology for robots to collaborate with humans. Existing human motion prediction methods are all built under an ideal assumption that robots can instantaneously react, which ignores the time delay introduced during data processing & analysis and future reaction planning – jointly known as "response latency". Consequently, the predictions made within this latency period become meaningless for practical use, as part of the time has passed and the corresponding real motions have already occurred before robot deliver its reaction. In this paper, we argue that the seemingly meaningless prediction period, however, can be leveraged to enhance prediction accuracy significantly. We propose LAL, a Latency-aware Auxiliary Learning framework, which shifts the existing "reaction instantaneous" convention into a new motion prediction paradigm with both latency compatibility and utility. The framework consists of two branches handling different tasks: the primary branch learns to directly predict the valid target (excluding the beginning latency period) based on observation; while the auxiliary branch learns the same target, but based on the reformed observation with additional latency data incorporated. A direct and effective way of auxiliary feature sharing is forced by our tailored consistency loss, to gradually integrate auxiliary latency insights into the primary prediction branch. Estimated feature statistics-based alignment method is presented as optional step for primary branch refinement. Experiments show that LAL achieves significant improvement on prediction accuracy, without additional time consumption during testing.

The emergence of text-driven motion synthesis technique provides animators with great potential to create efficiently. However, in most cases, textual expressions only contain general and qualitative motion descriptions, while lack fine depiction and sufficient intensity, leading to the synthesized motions that either (a) semantically compliant but uncontrollable over specific pose details, or (b) even deviates from the provided descriptions, bringing animators with undesired cases. In this paper, we propose DiffKFC, a conditional diffusion model for text-driven motion synthesis with KeyFrames Collaborated, enabling realistic generation with collaborative and efficient dual-level control: coarse guidance at semantic level, with only few keyframes for direct and fine-grained depiction down to body posture level. Unlike existing inference-editing diffusion models that incorporate conditions without training, our conditional diffusion model is explicitly trained and can fully exploit correlations among texts, keyframes and the diffused target frames. To preserve the control capability of discrete and sparse keyframes, we customize dilated mask attention modules where only partial valid tokens participate in local-to-global attention, indicated by the dilated keyframe mask. Additionally, we develop a simple yet effective smoothness prior, which steers the generated frames towards seamless keyframe transitions at inference. Extensive experiments show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of semantic fidelity, but more importantly, is able to satisfy animator requirements through fine-grained guidance without tedious labor.

Domain shift is a challenge for supervised human pose estimation, where the source data and target data come from different distributions. This is why pose estimation methods generally perform worse on the test set than on the training set. Recently, test-time adaptation has proven to be an effective way to deal with domain shift in human pose estimation. Although the performance on the target domain has been improved, existing methods require a large number of weight updates for convergence, which is time-consuming and brings catastrophic forgetting. To solve these issues, we propose a meta-auxiliary learning method to achieve fast adaptation for domain shift during inference. Specifically, we take human pose estimation as the supervised primary task, and propose body-specific image inpainting as a self-supervised auxiliary task. First, we Jointly train the primary and auxiliary tasks to get a pre-trained model on the source domain. Then, meta-training correlates the performance of the two tasks to learn a good weight initialization. Finally, meta-testing adapts the meta-learned model to the target data through self-supervised learning. Benefiting from the meta-learning paradigm, the proposed method enables fast adaptation to the target domain while preserving the source domain knowledge. The carefully designed auxiliary task better pays attention to human-related semantics in a single image. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our test-time fast adaptation.

Generating realistic human motions with high framerate is an underexplored task, due to the varied framerates of training data, huge memory burden brought by high framerates and slow sampling speed of generative models. Recent advances make a compromise for training by downsampling high-framerate details away and discarding low-framerate samples, which suffer from severe information loss and restricted-framerate generation. In this paper, we found that the recent emerging paradigm of Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) that encode a signal into a continuous function can effectively tackle this challenging problem. To this end, we introduce NeRM, a generative model capable of taking advantage of varied-size data and capturing variational distribution of motions for high-framerate motion synthesis. By optimizing latent representation and a auto-decoder conditioned on temporal coordinates, NeRM learns continuous motion fields of sampled motion clips that ingeniously avoid explicit modeling of raw varied-size motions. This expressive latent representation is then used to learn a diffusion model that enables both unconditional and conditional generation of human motions. We demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods, and can generate arbitrary framerate motions. Additionally, we show that NeRM is not only memory-friendly, but also highly efficient even when generating high-framerate motions.

Heatmap regression has dominated human pose estimation due to its superior performance and strong generalization. To meet the requirements of traditional explicit neural networks for output form, existing heatmap-based methods discretize the originally continuous heatmap representation into 2D pixel arrays, which leads to performance degradation due to the introduction of quantization errors. This problem is significantly exacerbated as the size of the input image decreases, which makes heatmap-based methods not much better than coordinate regression on low-resolution images. In this paper, we propose a novel neural representation for human pose estimation called NerPE to achieve continuous heatmap regression. Given any position within the image range, NerPE regresses the corresponding confidence scores for body joints according to the surrounding image features, which guarantees continuity in space and confidence during training. Thanks to the decoupling from spatial resolution, NerPE can output the predicted heatmaps at arbitrary resolution during inference without retraining, which easily achieves sub-pixel localization precision. To reduce the computational cost, we design progressive coordinate decoding to cooperate with continuous heatmap regression, in which localization no longer requires the complete generation of high-resolution heatmaps. The code is available at https://github.com/hushengxiang/NerPE.

Stochastic human motion prediction aims to forecast multiple plausible future motions given a single pose sequence from the past. Most previous works focus on designing elaborate losses to improve the accuracy, while the diversity is typically characterized by randomly sampling a set of latent variables from the latent prior, which is then decoded into possible motions. This joint training of sampling and decoding, however, suffers from posterior collapse as the learned latent variables tend to be ignored by a strong decoder, leading to limited diversity. Alternatively, inspired by the diffusion process in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, we propose MotionDiff, a diffusion probabilistic model to treat the kinematics of human joints as heated particles, which will diffuse from original states to a noise distribution. This process not only offers a natural way to obtain the "whitened'' latents without any trainable parameters, but also introduces a new noise in each diffusion step, both of which facilitate more diverse motions. Human motion prediction is then regarded as the reverse diffusion process that converts the noise distribution into realistic future motions conditioned on the observed sequence. Specifically, MotionDiff consists of two parts: a spatial-temporal transformer-based diffusion network to generate diverse yet plausible motions, and a flexible refinement network to further enable geometric losses and align with the ground truth. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our model yields the competitive performance in terms of both diversity and accuracy.