3rd Place Solution to Human Motion Challenges in Real-World and Clinical Settings (MoCha) @ECCV2026: Language-Aligned Motion Representations for Domain-Generalizable UPDRS-Gait Severity Estimation

Human motion-text retrieval provides a rigorous means of assessing cross-modal alignment. Prevailing benchmarks are dominated by homogeneous indoor motions, imbalanced motion distributions, and oversimplified, repetitive texts, which hinder the reliable measurement of cross-domain and cross-granularity alignment. We thus introduce MRBench, a comprehensive motion-text retrieval benchmark featuring heterogeneous motions, broad and balanced category coverage, and reliable, discriminative, multi-granular descriptions. MRBench is constructed through a meticulously designed multi-stage data curation pipeline, which filters and balances candidates, verifies unambiguous semantic alignment, and generates motion-grounded descriptions at multiple granularities. The resulting benchmark contains 3,390 motions drawn from motion capture, in-the-wild videos, synthetic videos, and motion generative models, covering 118 fine-grained categories. Each motion is paired with concise, standard, and fine-grained descriptions, yielding 10,170 captions. Extensive evaluations of representative retrieval baselines on MRBench reveal a substantial cross-dataset generalization gap and pronounced sensitivity to query granularity. We propose a lightweight granularity-aware model anchored at a frozen standard-caption-aligned retrieval model. LLM-based concise and fine-grained captions provide pseudo-supervision for extra-branch granularity-specific motion extractors and text adapters. For inference, granularity-aware score fusion integrates global and adapted similarities while strictly maintaining score comparability across all description levels. The resulting model improves mixed-granularity retrieval without compromising standard-caption performance. We believe that our MRBench provides a comprehensive testbed for advancing motion-language alignment evaluation.

We introduce MoLingo, a text-to-motion (T2M) model that generates realistic, lifelike human motion by denoising in a continuous latent space. Recent works perform latent space diffusion, either on the whole latent at once or auto-regressively over multiple latents. In this paper, we study how to make diffusion on continuous motion latents work best. We focus on two questions: (1) how to build a semantically aligned latent space so diffusion becomes more effective, and (2) how to best inject text conditioning so the motion follows the description closely. We propose a semantic-aligned motion encoder trained with frame-level text labels so that latents with similar text meaning stay close, which makes the latent space more diffusion-friendly. We also compare single-token conditioning with a multi-token cross-attention scheme and find that cross-attention gives better motion realism and text-motion alignment. With semantically aligned latents, auto-regressive generation, and cross-attention text conditioning, our model sets a new state of the art in human motion generation on standard metrics and in a user study. We will release our code and models for further research and downstream usage.

In this work, we propose \methodname, an LLM-based model for fine-grained human motion understanding that represents motion as a sequence of skeletal poses with explicit timestamps for each pose. Each pose encodes body joint positions and is temporally grounded with timestamp tokens, allowing the model to reason about motion order, duration, and rhythm. To study what supervision is needed for motion-language reasoning, we construct a diverse training mixture spanning pose captioning, pose question answering, motion captioning, and motion question answering. Our ablations show that the primary gains come from the diversity of pose- and motion-level supervision, while staged training provides a smaller additional benefit. Different from previous works that rely on ground-truth 3D motion capture, our approach supports both 2D and 3D skeletal motion representations through a unified pose encoder, and can optionally incorporate video to provide contextual information. Extensive experiments on BABEL-QA, HuMMan-QA, CompMo, NTU-RGB+D, and QEVD-Coach demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of explicit temporal encoding and diverse pose- and motion-level supervision for fine-grained human motion understanding. Notably, even when using only 2D skeletal input, our approach surpasses previous 3D-based methods.