Generating human motion with precise spatial control is a challenging problem. Existing approaches often require task-specific training or slow optimization, and enforcing hard constraints frequently disrupts motion naturalness. Building on the observation that many animation tasks can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, we introduce ProjFlow, a training-free sampler that achieves zero-shot, exact satisfaction of linear spatial constraints while preserving motion realism. Our key advance is a novel kinematics-aware metric that encodes skeletal topology. This metric allows the sampler to enforce hard constraints by distributing corrections coherently across the entire skeleton, avoiding the unnatural artifacts of naive projection. Furthermore, for sparse inputs, such as filling in long gaps between a few keyframes, we introduce a time-varying formulation using pseudo-observations that fade during sampling. Extensive experiments on representative applications, motion inpainting, and 2D-to-3D lifting, demonstrate that ProjFlow achieves exact constraint satisfaction and matches or improves realism over zero-shot baselines, while remaining competitive with training-based controllers.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of the Projection Sampling Step. At each timestep t : (1) predict the clean endpoint x^1 from xt using the learned velocity vθ(xt,t) ; (2) enforce the linear–Gaussian measurements y=Ax+ϵ by computing a correction Δx1⋆ that projects x^1 to the measurement set under the kinematics-aware metric R . This metric encodes skeletal topology and spreads updates coherently along the kinematic tree. The measurement covariance Σ modulates the pull toward the observations; smaller values yield stronger attraction and recover hard constraints as Σ→0 . (3) Finally, stochastically recompose the corrected endpoint to obtain the next state xt+Δt .
Figure 3: Pseudo-observations for motion inpainting. Sparse observations are interpolated to guide intermediate frames. This guidance is controlled by two mechanisms: Dynamic Masking activates a time-scheduled neighborhood, and Adaptive Variance treats original observations as hard constraints and the interpolated guides as soft constraints.
Figure 4: Text-conditioned pelvis-trajectory control. Given the prompt “ a person runs forward in an S-shaped path ” and a pelvis control signal, we compare OmniControl [ 63 ] , MaskControl [ 45 ] , and ProjFlow (ours). The rendered motions and the trajectory plots both visualize the generated pelvis trajectory ( orange ) overlaid on the target control signal ( gray dotted line ).
Controlling Joint
Methods
Zero-shot?
FID ↓
R-Precision
Diversity →
Foot Skating
Traj. err. ↓
Loc. err. ↓
Avg. err. ↓
Top 3
Ratio. ↓
GT
-
0.000
0.795
10.455
-
0.000
0.000
0.000
Pelvis
MDM [ 57 ]
✓
1.792
0.673
9.131
0.1019
0.4022
0.3076
0.5959
PriorMDM [ 51 ]
✗
0.393
0.707
9.847
0.0897
0.3457
0.2132
0.4417
GMD [ 21 ]
✓
0.238
0.763
10.011
0.1009
0.0931
0.0321
0.1439
OmniControl [ 63 ]
✗
0.081
0.789
10.323
0.0547
0.0387
0.0096
0.0338
Table 1: Quantitative text-conditioned motion generation with spatial control signals and upper-body editing on HumanML3D [ 15 ] . In the first section, methods are trained and evaluated solely on pelvis controls. In the middle section, methods are trained on all joints and evaluated separately on each controlled joint. Only average results are reported for brevity. We include details in the supplementary material. The last section presents upper-body editing results. bold face / underline indicates the best/2 nd results.
Figure 5: 2D-to-3D hand-trajectory lifting with text conditioning. The input condition includes the text prompt “ a person draws a heart with their hand while walking ,” an initial 2D keypose, and a left-wrist 2D trajectory shaped like a heart. Sketch2Anim [ 68 ] fails to reproduce the heart path precisely, the shape collapses, and the subject does not exhibit walking motion. In contrast, ProjFlow follows the heart-shaped wrist trajectory accurately while maintaining a natural walking motion throughout the sequence.
Condition
Method
Realism
Control Accuracy
Text-Motion Matching
FID ↓
Foot Skating ↓
MPJPE-2D ↓
MPJPE-3D ↓
Avg. Err.-2D ↓
Avg. Err.-3D ↓
Matching ↓
R-precision (Top-3) ↑
Average
Motion Retrieval
0.690
0.064
0.057
0.076
0.290
0.410
4.060
0.640
Lift-and-Control
0.979
0.089
0.054
0.071
0.261
0.340
3.297
0.752
Direct 2D-to-Motion
2.553
0.112
0.040
0.055
0.193
0.275
3.723
0.687
Sketch2Anim [ 68 ]
0.525
0.103
0.036
0.048
0.087
0.134
3.077
0.802
ACMDM-S-PS22+ProjFlow
0.349
0.146
0.000
0.042
0.000
0.331
3.363
0.748
Table 2: Quantitative analysis of ProjFlow and three baseline models proposed in Sketch2Anim [ 68 ] on the HumanML3D [ 15 ] . Evaluation metrics on motion realism, control accuracy, and text-motion match are presented. Following OmniControl [ 63 ] , we report both the average error of all joints (Average) and their random combination (Cross). bold face / underline indicates the best/2 nd results.
Variant
FID ↓
R-Prec.
Div. →
Foot ↓
Traj. ↓
Loc. ↓
Avg. ↓
ProjFlow (Full)
0.097
0.779
10.651
0.0603
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
Euclid. ( R=I )
1.152
0.740
10.107
0.0595
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
No noise ( ηt=0 )
3.429
0.707
9.307
0.0863
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
Plain masking
0.880
0.748
10.187
0.0632
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
Table 3: Ablation studies of ProjFlow.
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Symbol
Type / shape
Note
A
Rm×d
linear operator
y
Rm
measurements
x1
Rd
clean motion endpoint
x^1
Rd
estimate of x1
Σ
Rm×m
PSD covariance
R
Rd×d
PD metric / precision
Appendix
Table 4: Notation used in the supplementary derivations.
Block
Name
Symbol
Value
Kinematics-aware metric
joint coupling weight
wkin
10.0
ridge
λ
1.0
Dynamic Masking
min radius (frames)
lmin
3
max radius (frames)
lmax
10
Adaptive Variance
time base
τmin
0.1
strength
c0
3.0
Appendix
Table 5: Hyperparameters for motion inpainting.
Figure 6: Average inference time per 196-frame sample .
Figure 7: Ablation of ProjFlow components vs. control intensity on motion inpainting. We compare the full model ( Full ) against variants that (i) replace the kinematics-aware metric with a Euclidean metric ( Euclid ), (ii) remove the stochastic noise-mixing step ( Without Noise ), or (iii) disable pseudo-observations and rely only on hard keyframes ( Plain Masking ).
Controlling Joint
Methods
FID ↓
R-Precision
Diversity →
Foot Skating
Traj. err. ↓
Loc. err. ↓
Avg. err. ↓
Top 3
Ratio. ↓
GT
0.000
0.795
10.455
-
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
Pelvis
ACMDM - S - PS22+ProjFlow (Full)
0.107
0.784
10.645
0.0630
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
ACMDM - S - PS22+ProjFlow (Euclid)
4.360
0.686
8.953
0.0550
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
ACMDM - S - PS22+ProjFlow (w/o noise)
2.439
0.734
9.666
0.0960
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
ACMDM - S - PS22+ProjFlow (Plain Masking)
2.091
0.726
9.838
0.0658
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
Appendix
Table 6: Ablation of ACMDM-S-PS22+ProjFlow on HumanML3D. Methods are evaluated on all joints and reported per controlled joint. bold face / underline indicates the best/2 nd results if applied.
Controlling Joint
Methods
Zero-shot?
FID ↓
R-Precision
Diversity →
Foot Skating
Traj. err. ↓
Loc. err. ↓
Avg. err. ↓
Top 3
Ratio. ↓
GT
−
0.000
0.795
10.455
-
0.000
0.000
0.000
Train On Pelvis
MDM [ 57 ]
✓
1.792
0.673
9.131
0.1019
0.4022
0.3076
0.5959
PriorMDM [ 51 ]
✗
0.393
0.707
9.847
0.0897
0.3457
0.2132
0.4417
GMD [ 21 ]
✓
0.238
0.763
10.011
0.1009
0.0931
0.0321
0.1439
OmniContol [ 63 ]
✗
0.081
0.789
10.323
0.0547
0.0387
0.0096
0.0338
Appendix
Table 7: Quantitative text-conditioned motion generation with spatial control signals and upper-body editing on HumanML3D. In the first section, methods are trained and evaluated solely on pelvis controls. In the middle section, methods are trained on all joints and evaluated separately on each controlled joint. bold face / underline indicates the best/2 nd results.
Controlling Joint
Methods
Zero-shot?
FID ↓
R-Precision
Diversity →
Foot Skating
Traj. err. ↓
Loc. err. ↓
Avg. err. ↓
Top 3
Ratio. ↓
GT
-
0.002
0.797
9.503
-
0.000
0.000
0.000
Train On Pelvis
MDM [ 57 ]
✓
0.698
0.602
9.197
0.1019
40.22
30.76
59.59
PriorMDM [ 51 ]
✗
0.475
0.583
9.156
0.0897
34.57
21.32
44.17
GMD [ 21 ]
✓
0.576
0.665
9.206
0.1009
9.31
3.21
14.39
OmniControl [ 63 ]
✗
0.218
0.687
9.422
0.0547
3.87
0.96
3.38
Appendix
Table 8: Quantitative text-conditioned motion generation with spatial control signals and upper-body editing on HumanML3D [ 15 ] . The first section covers pelvis-only control; the middle section shows the average for all joints. The last section presents upper-body editing results. bold face / underline indicates the best/2 nd results.
Recent advances in diffusion and flow models have substantially improved text-driven human motion generation. Yet most methods generate in low-dimensional, temporally downsampled latent spaces learned primarily for reconstruction, a bottleneck that can limit generation quality and preclude direct manipulation of individual frames and joints. We introduce MotionSpaceFlow (MSFlow), a representation-aware flow-matching framework that predicts clean motion directly in continuous motion space without a learned encoder or decoder. To account for the anisotropic structure of direct motion representations, we propose representation-aware noise scaling and show how the initial Gaussian source scale governs the covariance of intermediate probability-path marginals. We further introduce a Representation-Aware Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (RA-MMDiT), which jointly updates token-level language and full-resolution motion features through joint attention while adapting temporal information flow to the motion representation: causal attention for incremental features defined by frame-to-frame changes, and bidirectional attention for global features such as absolute joint coordinates. Across different datasets and motion representations, MSFlow achieves state-of-the-art text-to-motion performance. Its global representation variant additionally enables zero-shot, inference-time control over any joint or frame through projection sampling without control-conditioned training, delivering leading motion quality with exact constraint satisfaction.
Deep generative models provide state-of-the-art performance across a wide array of applications, with recent studies showing increasing applicability for science and engineering. Despite a growing corpus of literature focused on the integration of physics-based constraints into the generation process, existing approaches fail to enforce strict constraint satisfaction while maintaining sample quality. In particular, training-free constrained sampling methods, while providing per-sample feasibility guarantees, introduce a fundamental mismatch between the training objective and the constrained sampling procedure, often leading to performance degradation. Identifying this training-sampling misalignment as a central limitation of current constrained generative modeling approaches, this paper proposes Constraint-Aware Flow Matching, a novel end-to-end framework that explicitly incorporates constraint projections into the training objective. By aligning the model's learned dynamics with the constrained sampling process, the proposed method mitigates distributional shift induced by projection-based corrections, enabling high-quality constrained generation. The proposed approach is evaluated on three challenging real-world benchmarks, illustrating the generality and efficacy of the method.
Jacob K. Christopher, James E. Warner, Ferdinando Fioretto
University of Virginia · NASA Langley Research Center
Training-free controllable motion generation has attracted growing interest for enabling flexible constraint enforcement without constraint-specific training. However, existing training-free methods require constraints to be continuous objective-based with differentiable losses, while many real-world requirements are criterion-based and provide only discontinuous, sparse, or even black-box feedback. In this paper, we propose Motion-Inference-as-Control (MIC), the first training-free motion generation framework that handles both continuous objective-based and criterion-based motion constraints under a shared mechanism. The key idea is to cast diffusion-based motion generation as a stochastic control problem. This perspective not only provides principled and practically effective step-wise control laws that support criterion-based constraints without requiring differentiability and naturally accommodate objective-based constraints as a special case, but also motivates a control-oriented constraint coordination mechanism that adaptively balances and reconciles motion constraints during generation. Experiments across diverse constraint settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Xiaofei Hui, Bo Yan, Haoxuan Qu +2
Lancaster University, United Kingdom · Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, China