We introduce Motion Diversification Networks, a novel framework for learning to generate realistic and diverse 3D human motion. Despite recent advances in deep generative motion modeling, existing models often fail to produce samples that capture the full range of plausible and natural 3D human motion within a given context. The lack of diversity becomes even more apparent in applications where subtle and multi-modal 3D human forecasting is crucial for safety, such as robotics and autonomous driving. Towards more realistic and functional 3D motion models, we highlight limitations in existing generative modeling techniques, particularly in overly simplistic latent code sampling strategies. We then introduce a transformer-based diversification mechanism that learns to effectively guide sampling in the latent space. Our proposed attention-based module queries multiple stochastic samples to flexibly predict a diverse set of latent codes which can be subsequently decoded into motion samples. The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art diversity and accuracy prediction performance across a range of benchmarks and settings, particularly when used to forecast intricate in-the-wild 3D human motion within complex urban environments. Our models, datasets, and code are available at https://mdncvpr.github.iol.

People who are blind perceive the world differently than those who are sighted, which can result in distinct motion characteristics. For instance, when crossing at an intersection, blind individuals may have different patterns of movement, such as veering more from a straight path or using touch-based exploration around curbs and obstacles. These behaviors may appear less predictable to motion models embedded in technologies such as autonomous vehicles. Yet, the ability of 3D motion models to capture such behavior has not been previously studied, as existing datasets for 3D human motion currently lack diversity and are biased toward people who are sighted. In this work, we introduce BlindWays, the first multimodal motion benchmark for pedestrians who are blind. We collect 3D motion data using wearable sensors with 11 blind participants navigating eight different routes in a real-world urban setting. Additionally, we provide rich textual descriptions that capture the distinctive movement characteristics of blind pedestrians and their interactions with both the navigation aid (e.g., a white cane or a guide dog) and the environment. We benchmark state-of-the-art 3D human prediction models, finding poor performance with off-the-shelf and pre-training-based methods for our novel task. To contribute toward safer and more reliable systems that can seamlessly reason over diverse human movements in their environments, our text-and-motion benchmark is available at https://blindways.github.io/.