PhyMotion: Structured 3D Motion Reward for Physics-Grounded Human Video Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Huang, Yidong, Wang, Zun, Lin, Han, Kim, Dong-Ki, Omidshafiei, Shayegan, Yoon, Jaehong, Cho, Jaemin, Zhang, Yue, Bansal, Mohit
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Huang, Yidong
Wang, Zun
Lin, Han
Kim, Dong-Ki
Omidshafiei, Shayegan
Yoon, Jaehong
Cho, Jaemin
Zhang, Yue
Bansal, Mohit
author_facet Huang, Yidong
Wang, Zun
Lin, Han
Kim, Dong-Ki
Omidshafiei, Shayegan
Yoon, Jaehong
Cho, Jaemin
Zhang, Yue
Bansal, Mohit
contents Generating realistic human motion is a central yet unsolved challenge in video generation. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training has driven recent gains in general video quality, extending it to human motion remains bottlenecked by a reward signal that cannot reliably score motion realism. Existing video rewards primarily rely on 2D perceptual signals, without explicitly modeling the 3D body state, contact, and dynamics underlying articulated human motion, and often assign high scores to videos with floating bodies or physically implausible movements. To address this, we propose PhyMotion, a structured, fine-grained motion reward that grounds recovered 3D human trajectories in a physics simulator and evaluates motion quality along multiple dimensions of physical feasibility. Concretely, we recover SMPL body meshes from generated videos, retarget them onto a humanoid in the MuJoCo physics simulator, and evaluate the resulting motion along three axes: kinematic plausibility, contact and balance consistency, and dynamic feasibility. Each component provides a continuous and interpretable signal tied to a specific aspect of motion quality, allowing the reward to capture which aspects of motion are physically correct or violated. Experiments show that PhyMotion achieves stronger correlation with human judgments than existing reward formulations. These gains carry over to RL-based post-training, where optimizing PhyMotion leads to larger and more consistent improvements than optimizing existing rewards, improving motion realism across both autoregressive and bidirectional video generators under both automatic metrics and blind human evaluation (+68 Elo gain). Ablations show that the three axes provide complementary supervision signals, while the reward preserves overall video generation quality with only modest training overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_14269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PhyMotion: Structured 3D Motion Reward for Physics-Grounded Human Video Generation
Huang, Yidong
Wang, Zun
Lin, Han
Kim, Dong-Ki
Omidshafiei, Shayegan
Yoon, Jaehong
Cho, Jaemin
Zhang, Yue
Bansal, Mohit
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Generating realistic human motion is a central yet unsolved challenge in video generation. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training has driven recent gains in general video quality, extending it to human motion remains bottlenecked by a reward signal that cannot reliably score motion realism. Existing video rewards primarily rely on 2D perceptual signals, without explicitly modeling the 3D body state, contact, and dynamics underlying articulated human motion, and often assign high scores to videos with floating bodies or physically implausible movements. To address this, we propose PhyMotion, a structured, fine-grained motion reward that grounds recovered 3D human trajectories in a physics simulator and evaluates motion quality along multiple dimensions of physical feasibility. Concretely, we recover SMPL body meshes from generated videos, retarget them onto a humanoid in the MuJoCo physics simulator, and evaluate the resulting motion along three axes: kinematic plausibility, contact and balance consistency, and dynamic feasibility. Each component provides a continuous and interpretable signal tied to a specific aspect of motion quality, allowing the reward to capture which aspects of motion are physically correct or violated. Experiments show that PhyMotion achieves stronger correlation with human judgments than existing reward formulations. These gains carry over to RL-based post-training, where optimizing PhyMotion leads to larger and more consistent improvements than optimizing existing rewards, improving motion realism across both autoregressive and bidirectional video generators under both automatic metrics and blind human evaluation (+68 Elo gain). Ablations show that the three axes provide complementary supervision signals, while the reward preserves overall video generation quality with only modest training overhead.
title PhyMotion: Structured 3D Motion Reward for Physics-Grounded Human Video Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14269