Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhou, Pengfei, Zhang, Xiangyue, Shen, Xukun, Hu, Yong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29655
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912992111624192
author Zhou, Pengfei
Zhang, Xiangyue
Shen, Xukun
Hu, Yong
author_facet Zhou, Pengfei
Zhang, Xiangyue
Shen, Xukun
Hu, Yong
contents Masked generative models have become a strong paradigm for text-to-motion synthesis, but they still treat motion frames too uniformly during masking, attention, and decoding. This is a poor match for motion, where local dynamic complexity varies sharply over time. We show that current masked motion generators degrade disproportionately on dynamically complex motions, and that frame-wise generation error is strongly correlated with motion dynamics. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce the Motion Spectral Descriptor (MSD), a simple and parameter-free measure of local dynamic complexity computed from the short-time spectrum of motion velocity. Unlike learned difficulty predictors, MSD is deterministic, interpretable, and derived directly from the motion signal itself. We use MSD to make masked motion generation complexity-aware. In particular, MSD guides content-focused masking during training, provides a spectral similarity prior for self-attention, and can additionally modulate token-level sampling during iterative decoding. Built on top of masked motion generators, our method, DynMask, improves motion generation most clearly on dynamically complex motions while also yielding stronger overall FID on HumanML3D and KIT-ML. These results suggest that respecting local motion complexity is a useful design principle for masked motion generation. Project page: https://xiangyue-zhang.github.io/DynMask
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29655
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Not All Frames Are Equal: Complexity-Aware Masked Motion Generation via Motion Spectral Descriptors
Zhou, Pengfei
Zhang, Xiangyue
Shen, Xukun
Hu, Yong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Masked generative models have become a strong paradigm for text-to-motion synthesis, but they still treat motion frames too uniformly during masking, attention, and decoding. This is a poor match for motion, where local dynamic complexity varies sharply over time. We show that current masked motion generators degrade disproportionately on dynamically complex motions, and that frame-wise generation error is strongly correlated with motion dynamics. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce the Motion Spectral Descriptor (MSD), a simple and parameter-free measure of local dynamic complexity computed from the short-time spectrum of motion velocity. Unlike learned difficulty predictors, MSD is deterministic, interpretable, and derived directly from the motion signal itself. We use MSD to make masked motion generation complexity-aware. In particular, MSD guides content-focused masking during training, provides a spectral similarity prior for self-attention, and can additionally modulate token-level sampling during iterative decoding. Built on top of masked motion generators, our method, DynMask, improves motion generation most clearly on dynamically complex motions while also yielding stronger overall FID on HumanML3D and KIT-ML. These results suggest that respecting local motion complexity is a useful design principle for masked motion generation. Project page: https://xiangyue-zhang.github.io/DynMask
title Not All Frames Are Equal: Complexity-Aware Masked Motion Generation via Motion Spectral Descriptors
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29655