Text Dictates, Music Decorates: Energy-based Attention for Editable Dance Motion Generation

Existing music-driven dance generation approaches have achieved strong realism and effective audio-motion alignment. However, they generally lack semantic controllability, making it difficult to guide specific movements through natural language descriptions. This limitation primarily stems from the absence of large-scale datasets that jointly align music, text, and motion for supervised learning of text-conditioned control. To address this challenge, we propose TeMuDance, a framework that enables text-based control for music-conditioned dance generation without requiring any manually annotated music-text-motion triplet dataset. TeMuDance introduces a motion-centred bridging paradigm that leverages motion as a shared semantic anchor to align disjoint music-dance and text-motion datasets within a unified embedding space, enabling cross-modal retrieval of missing modalities for end-to-end training. A lightweight text control branch is then trained on top of a frozen music-to-dance diffusion backbone, preserving rhythmic fidelity while enabling fine-grained semantic guidance. To further suppress noise inherent in the retrieved supervision, we design a dual-stream fine-tuning strategy with confidence-based filtering. We also propose a novel task-aligned metric that quantifies whether textual prompts induce the intended kinematic attributes under music conditioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeMuDance achieves competitive dance quality while substantially improving text-conditioned control over existing methods.

Dance-to-music generation is a promising task for applications such as choreography support and automatic accompaniment, where temporal coordination between body movement and sound is essential. In particular, using human joint positions as the motion representation is attractive because they explicitly capture body dynamics while being lightweight, privacy-preserving, and easy to integrate with motion capture and pose-estimation pipelines. A central challenge in this setting, however, is the scarcity of high-quality paired dance-music data, since collecting accurately synchronized pairs is costly and often constrained by copyright and performance rights. This makes it difficult to train end-to-end models solely from paired data. To address this issue, we propose a dance-conditioned music generation framework that efficiently exploits both unpaired and paired data. Our method combines pretrained unimodal encoders for motion and music, beat-guided contrastive pretraining to align their feature spaces, and a ControlNet-style conditioning module on top of a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model. Experiments on AIST++ demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve both dance-music alignment and audio quality, as confirmed by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to a state-of-the-art method, our approach achieves superior dance alignment performance and competitive audio quality. Code is available at https://github.com/kmraven/AudioLDM-ControlNet .

Music-driven dance generation aims to produce human motion that is both rhythmically synchronized and semantically consistent with music. While recent neural approaches have achieved impressive visual realism, they typically model motion as a continuous signal and neglect its compositional nature, making generated dances structurally incoherent and difficult to control. In this work, we introduce a structure-aware framework that models choreography as a sequence of atomic movements-semantically interpretable motion events that serve as the building blocks of dance. To construct this atomic movement vocabulary, we first segment large-scale dance data and cluster them into atomic movement groups. We then employ a large language model to semantically relabel and refine the clusters, yielding a set of interpretable and reusable atomic movements. Based on these atomic movement annotations, we design a two-stage generation framework that mirrors the human choreography process. In the atomic movement planning stage, the model predicts the type, duration, and timing of atomic movements conditioned on the input music, forming a symbolic dance allocation. In the completion stage, a transition-aware generator synthesizes smooth and stylistically coherent motion conditioned on the planned structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces dances with significantly improved structural coherence, rhythmic alignment, and perceptual naturalness compared to existing baselines, while providing enhanced interpretability and controllable editing through explicit structural representation.