Towards Motion Turing Test: Evaluating Human-Likeness in Humanoid Robots
Authors: Mingzhe Li, Mengyin Liu, Zekai Wu, Xincheng Lin, Junsheng Zhang, Ming Yan, Zengye Xie, Changwang Zhang, Chenglu Wen, Lan Xu, Siqi Shen, Cheng Wang
Organizations: Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing, Xiamen University · Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, School of Informatics, Xiamen University · National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University · OPPO Research Institute · ShanghaiTech University
Humanoid robots have achieved significant progress in motion generation and control, exhibiting movements that appear increasingly natural and human-like. Inspired by the Turing Test, we propose the Motion Turing Test, a framework that evaluates whether human observers can discriminate between humanoid robot and human poses using only kinematic information. To facilitate this evaluation, we present the Human-Humanoid Motion (HHMotion) dataset, which consists of 1,000 motion sequences spanning 15 action categories, performed by 11 humanoid models and 10 human subjects. All motion sequences are converted into SMPL-X representations to eliminate the influence of visual appearance. We recruited 30 annotators to rate the human-likeness of each pose on a 0-5 scale, resulting in over 500 hours of annotation. Analysis of the collected data reveals that humanoid motions still exhibit noticeable deviations from human movements, particularly in dynamic actions such as jumping, boxing, and running. Building on HHMotion, we formulate a human-likeness evaluation task that aims to automatically predict human-likeness scores from motion data. Despite recent progress in multimodal large language models, we find that they remain inadequate for assessing motion human-likeness. To address this, we propose a simple baseline model and demonstrate that it outperforms several contemporary LLM-based methods. The dataset, code, and benchmark will be publicly released to support future research in the community.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Motion Turing Test : Evaluators judge whether the pose sequence resembles human motion, focusing solely on motion without appearance cues.
Dataset
Human
Humanoid
#Humanoid Models
Human&Humanoid
Human-likeness score
Duration
Motion
#Category
#Clips
MoCap
Video
Simulation
Real
AMASS [ 48 ]
✔*
-
-
-
-
-
-
40+h
General
-
26.3k
Human3.6M [ 29 ]
✔
✔
-
-
-
-
-
-
Daily
15
-
LAFAN1 [ 23 ]
✔
-
-
-
-
-
-
4.6h
Sports
-
-
Motion-X [ 44 ]
✔
✔
-
-
-
-
-
144.2h
General
-
81,084
IDEA400 (Motion-X) [ 44 ]
✔
✔
-
-
-
-
-
-
General
400
13k
Table 1: Comparisons with related datasets. The “-” symbol indicates that it is not included in the dataset. The “*” symbol denotes that this specific data type in the dataset is a combination of prior datasets and does not incorporate newly acquired data.
Figure 2: Action sources, types, and category distribution in the HHMotion dataset, illustrating the diverse actions of both humans and humanoid robots.
Figure 3: Overview of the human scoring pipeline , where all the humanoid robot and human motions are converted into SMPL-X poses and evaluated by human annotators. The resulting 0–5 scores quantitatively assess the human-likeness of each motion.
Figure 4: Human-likeness scoring rules used in evaluating motion clips on a 0–5 Likert scale, focusing solely on motion quality.
Figure 5: Overall distribution of motion human-likeness scores for human and humanoid motions ( left ) and human-likeness scores for humanoid in simulation and real scenarios ( right ).
Action Category
Human
Humanoid
Score Difference
Smallest Differences
stand
3.80
1.97
1.83
sit
4.18
2.63
1.55
ski
3.13
1.76
1.37
walk
3.92
2.61
1.31
dance
3.47
2.26
1.21
Table 2: Top 5 and bottom 5 action categories ranked by score difference between human and real humanoid motions. The scores here are calculated based on the average score of the last 25 annotators after the IAC check.
Figure 6: Representative SMPL-X sequences illustrate where humanoid robots perform poorly (upper part) and well (lower part).
Figure 7: Our proposed PTR-Net baseline consists of a temporal encoder, spatial-temporal graph convolution, and attention pooling, then uses a score regressor to predict the human-likeness score.
Model
MAE ↓
RMSE ↓
Spearman’s ρ↑
Gemini 2.5 Pro (DE)*
1.3105
1.5873
0.1609
Gemini 2.5 Pro (CGE)*
1.3314
1.5986
0.1658
Gemini 2.5 Pro (PDE)*
1.2616
1.5397
0.2188
Gemini 2.5 Pro (DE-CoT)*
1.6040
1.9146
0.1353
Gemini 2.5 Pro (PA-CoT)*
1.2682
1.5214
0.2303
Qwen3-VL-Plus (shot)*
1.7714
2.1018
–
Table 3: Quantitative results for different models on the Motion Turing Test benchmark. “” indicates VLM-based evaluation without task-specific training. Qwen3-VL-Plus (shot) denotes that its results remain identical in DE/CGE/PED/DE-CoT/PA-CoT settings. “–” indicates invalid ρ due to constant outputs.
Figure 8: Four representative motion examples with PTR-Net predictions compared to human-annotated scores.
Model Variant
MAE ↓
RMSE ↓
Spearman’s ρ↑
w/o Temporal Encoder
0.7631
0.9691
0.3610
w/o Attention Pooling
0.6185
0.8203
0.6255
w/o Lreg
0.5983
0.7958
0.6215
PTR-Net(Full Model)
0.5813
0.7926
0.6841
Table 4: Ablation study of PTR-Net components on the Motion Turing Test benchmark.
Figure 9: (a–b) Score distributions of human annotators and PTR-Net predictions for both human (imitating humanoid) and humanoid motions . (Bottom) Representative dance imitation pairs illustrating near-indistinguishable motion patterns.
Figure 10: Out-of-distribution evaluation on the XPeng IRON [ 59 ] humanoid robot.