cs.RODec 29, 2025

Do You Have Freestyle? Expressive Humanoid Locomotion via Audio Control

Authors: Zhe LiYangyang WeiBoan ZhuTao HuangZhenguo SunYibo PengPengwei WangZhongyuan Wang+4 more

Organizations: Nanyang Technological University · BAAI · Harbin Institute of Technology · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Sydney · State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University

Abstract

Humans intuitively move to sound, but current humanoid robots lack expressive improvisational capabilities, confined to predefined motions or sparse commands. Generating motion from audio and then retargeting it to robots relies on explicit motion reconstruction, leading to cascaded errors, high latency, and disjointed acoustic-actuation mapping. We propose RoboPerform, the first unified audio-to-locomotion framework that can directly generate music-driven dance and speech-driven co-speech gestures from audio. Guided by the core principle of "motion = content + style", the framework treats audio as implicit style signals and eliminates the need for explicit motion reconstruction. RoboPerform integrates a ResMoE teacher policy for adapting to diverse motion patterns and a diffusion-based student policy for audio style injection. This retargeting-free design ensures low latency and high fidelity. Experimental validation shows that RoboPerform achieves promising results in physical plausibility and audio alignment, successfully transforming robots into responsive performers capable of reacting to audio.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Robot Drummer: Learning Rhythmic Skills for Humanoid Drumming

    Jul 15, 2025Asad Ali Shahid, Francesco Braghin, Loris Roveda