Existing human motion diffusion methods provide strong motion generation quality, and recent style transfer models can inject target style cues, but fine-grained continuous control of style intensity remains underexplored. In production, style intensity is subjective across artists and directors, so the practical requirement is not a universal absolute unit, but a reliable monotonic control axis. We propose Motion Style Slider, a motion-to-motion style transfer framework for endpoint-supervised continuous control. Given a content motion and a style motion, we construct a style direction in a learned motion-style embedding space and condition diffusion generation with a scalar intensity. The training objective combines diffusion denoising with latent intensity regularization to encourage smooth and monotonic style scaling without requiring intermediate-intensity ground-truth motions. Our framework is compatible with pretrained motion diffusion backbones and supports heterogeneous style datasets, including the multi-actor style motion dataset. To test out-of-range usability, we additionally introduce a small real-capture over-reaction extension and evaluate large-intensity behavior against these unseen targets. Experiments measure controllability, interpolation/extrapolation behavior, content preservation, and motion realism, with ablations on direction construction and loss design.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Motion Style Slider overview. Given a content motion and a target style endpoint, our model produces a continuous family of motions controlled by intensity α , from neutral-style behavior ( α=0 ) to stylized behavior ( α=1 ) and extrapolated over-reaction ( α>1 ).
Figure 2: Method pipeline. Given endpoint motions, we compute a style direction in latent space, sample an intensity value, build a style condition token, and train a diffusion denoiser with endpoint-aware supervision and latent intensity regularization.
Dataset
#Styles
#Contents
#Clips
Protocol Use
PerMo
33
10
13,220
main + ablation
Bandai-Namco
14
1
175
main
Xia
7
5
572
main
Ours (over-reaction)
2
5
188
extrapolation-only
Table 1: Dataset summary. Statistics from current canonical splits and our over-reaction extrapolation pairs used in this paper.
Method
FMD ↓
CRA ↑
SRA ↑
MonoViol ↓
LinErr ↓
ExtraErr ↓
DeepMotionEditing [ 1 ]
0.588
0.290
0.060
0.25
0.326
1.196
MCM-LDM [ 33 ]
0.381
0.808
0.265
0.11
0.358
1.174
Ours
0.457
0.606
0.295
0.05
0.280
1.109
Table 2: Main quantitative results. FMD/CRA/SRA/MonoViol/LinErr are averaged over PerMo/Bandai-Namco/Xia; ExtraErr is evaluated on the over-reaction set.
Dataset
FMD ↓
CRA ↑
SRA ↑
MonoViol ↓
LinErr ↓
PerMo
0.531 / 0.474
0.700 / 0.880
0.140 / 0.080
0.03 / 0.22
0.421 / 0.464
Bandai-Namco
0.143 / 0.237
0.714 / 1.000
0.714 / 0.429
0.01 / 0.06
0.259 / 0.368
Xia
0.279 / 0.346
0.108 / 0.351
0.405 / 0.216
0.07 / 0.05
0.261 / 0.407
Table 3: Per-dataset results. Each cell is Ours/MCM-LDM .
Variant
Llin
Lmono
Direction
FMD ↓
CRA ↑
SRA ↑
MonoViol ↓
LinErr ↓
Ours
Yes
Yes
instance
0.531
0.70
0.14
0.03
0.421
Dir=proto
Yes
Yes
proto
0.584
0.60
0.06
0.04
0.513
Dir=hybrid ( β=0.3 )
Yes
Yes
hybrid
0.588
0.70
0.12
0.03
0.509
w/o Llin
No
Yes
instance
0.605
0.54
0.06
0.03
0.422
w/o Lmono
Yes
No
instance
0.545
0.56
0.04
0.03
0.434
Table 4: Ablation study (PerMo). Effect of direction mode and loss terms.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison. Columns show style reference, content reference, and generated results from our method and baselines under a unified camera and rendering configuration.
Figure 4: Cross-content stylization example. Although our quantitative benchmark uses endpoint-paired motions to keep evaluation clean, the learned style direction can also be applied qualitatively across different content motions. Here, a neutral hop is edited using an angry kick reference; negative and large positive α values modulate the output along this reference direction while retaining the hopping content.
Method
Distinguish ↑
Stylization (L/M/H) ↑
Naturalness (L/M/H) ↑
Ours
4.92
3.92 / 4.61 / 5.18
4.64 / 4.83 / 4.53
MCM-LDM
2.36
3.56 / 3.59 / 3.46
4.74 / 4.71 / 4.71
Table 5: User study summary (6 matched motion cases, 11 participants). Scores are 1–7 Likert means of low/mid/high (L/M/H) intensity per section.
We introduce FlexMoGen, a novel framework for flexible human motion synthesis conditioned on both natural language descriptions and motion style references. Text prompts are effective at defining semantic content, but they are often limited in capturing fine-grained style details such as timing, limb articulation, and expressive dynamics. A style example clip supplements the text by conveying these nuanced motion characteristics directly, enabling the model to preserve high-level intent while reproducing the desired stylistic traits. Given a text prompt and a style example clip, FlexMoGen generates high-quality motions that preserve semantic content while faithfully reflecting the target style, offering users greater control over the animation generation process. Unlike prior methods that rely on discrete style labels and do not generalize to long or multi-style generation, FlexMoGen learns a variational style encoder without style supervision and supports long, time-varying, multi-style synthesis. Our framework jointly pre-trains the style encoder and a text-to-motion latent diffusion model within a unified architecture, modulating motion style through a lightweight adaptation module. It integrates an efficient relative positional encoding scheme and is trained on both stylized and non-stylized datasets, enabling strong generalization to unseen text-style combinations. Experiments show that FlexMoGen achieves the best balance between content fidelity and style reflection.
Kai Weixian Lan, Bodie Criswell, Briana Fedkiw +3
University of California, Davis, USA · University of Utah, USA · Epic Games, USA +1
Human motion may be viewed as a combination of action content, style, and body morphology. Existing motion style transfer methods transfer a reference style onto a content motion while assuming a canonical body, whereas shape-aware motion generators adapt motion to a target shape without explicit style control. This separation of motion style and shape (morphology) makes it difficult to generate stylized motions for non-canonical bodies; naively combining a style transfer module with a shape-aware generator often leaks action content from the style reference and disrupts shape-consistent kinematics. We present MorphoStyle, a framework for shape-aware motion style transfer that is built on a shape-conditioned Finite-Scalar-Quantization Variational Auto-Encoder (FSQ-VAE). The key contribution is to pose the desired style transfer as modular latent disentanglement comprising: (i) a contrastive style encoder that extracts content-decoupled style embeddings; (ii) a text-guided style-routing mechanism that locates style-relevant joints in a text-motion feature space; and (iii) a manifold preserving style modulator that injects discriminative style embeddings in content features as a temporally-gated low-rank offset. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MorphoStyle outperforms competing baselines in terms of both shape control and motion style transfer, while simultaneously providing quantitative shape control. For more details, please see project website: https://github.com/funkdub/MorphoStyle.
Xin Feng, Eleonora D'Arnese, Mohan Sridharan
Institute of Perception, Action, and Behavior School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK
Text-driven motion diffusion models are capable of generating realistic human motions, but text alone often struggles to express fine-level nuances of motion, commonly referred to as style. Recent approaches have tackled this challenge by attaching a style injection mechanism to a pretrained text-driven diffusion model. Existing stylization methods, however, either require style-specific fine-tuning of existing models or rely on heavy ControlNet-based architectures, limiting efficiency and generalization to unseen styles. We propose a lightweight style conditioning framework that dynamically modulates a pretrained diffusion model through hypernetwork-generated LoRA parameters. A style reference motion is encoded into a global style embedding, which is mapped by a hypernetwork to low-rank updates applied at each denoising step of the diffusion model. By structuring the style latent space with a supervised contrastive loss, our framework reliably captures diverse stylistic attributes, improves generalization to unseen styles, and supports optimization-based guidance without requiring predefined style categories. Experiments on the HumanML3D and 100STYLE datasets show state-of-the-art stylization results, while achieving improved stylization for unseen styles.
Junhyuk Jeon, Seokhyeon Hong, Junyong Noh
Visual Media Lab, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea