TAME:Topology-Aware Text-Driven Motion Editing across Heterogeneous Humanoid Skeletons
Organizations: Nanyang Technological University · KTH Royal Institute of Technology · Lancaster University
Abstract
Text-driven motion editing modifies an existing motion sequence according to a text instruction while preserving the content of the source motion. Existing methods are typically built for a single, fixed skeletal topology, which limits their use in animation pipelines where characters differ in joint count and skeletal hierarchy. We present Topology-Aware Motion Editor (TAME), a flow-matching transformer that edits motions on humanoid skeletons of varying topology. TAME represents motion as per-joint, per-frame tokens and models interactions among joints, across frames, and with the text instruction through skeletal, temporal, and text cross-attention layers. To make the skeletal attention follow each character's hierarchy, TAME replaces full joint attention with Topology-Constrained Skeletal Propagation (TCSP), which restricts attention to one-hop kinematic neighbors in the skeleton's adjacency matrix. We further introduce Edit-Focused Representation Alignment (EFRA), a self-distilled representation alignment strategy that aligns student features with cleaner EMA-teacher features exclusively on edit-relevant joint-time tokens, making edits faithful to the instruction. To make this setting trainable and comparable, we construct TopoMotionFix, a multi-topology extension of MotionFix with seen- and unseen-topology evaluation protocols. TAME outperforms previous methods in edit alignment and source preservation on MotionFix and reliably edits motions on unseen skeletons in TopoMotionFix.
Figures & tables
| Dataset | Protocol | Method | Generated-to-Target (Batch-32) | Generated-to-Source (Batch-32) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R@1 | R@2 | R@3 | AvgR | R@1 | R@2 | R@3 | AvgR | |||
| GT | 100.00 | 100.00 | 100.00 | 1.00 | 74.01 | 84.52 | 89.91 | 2.03 | ||
| MotionFix | Seen | MDM ( Tevet et al., 2023 ) | 4.03 | 7.56 | 10.48 | 15.55 | 2.62 | 6.15 | 9.38 | 15.88 |
| MotionFix | Seen | MDM-BP ( Athanasiou et al., 2024 ) | 39.10 | 50.09 | 54.84 | 6.46 | 61.28 | 69.55 | 73.99 | 4.21 |
| MotionFix | Seen | TMED ( Athanasiou et al., 2024 ) | 64.11 | 76.51 | 82.56 | 2.72 | 73.19 | 85.08 | 91.03 | 1.92 |
| MotionFix | Seen | MotionReFit ( Jiang et al., 2025b ) | 66.33 | 80.05 | 84.98 | 2.64 | 83.47 | 90.42 | 92.84 | 1.73 |
| Generated-to-Target (Batch-32) | Generated-to-Source (Batch-32) | ||||||||||
| PH | Block | Edit Mask | R@1 | R@2 | R@3 | AvgR | R@1 | R@2 | R@3 | AvgR | |
| TAME w/o TCSP , w/o EFRA | — | — | — | 74.80 | 88.00 | 92.64 | 1.80 | 84.38 | 92.64 | 95.16 | 1.52 |
| TAME w/o EFRA | — | — | — | 74.70 | 87.50 | 90.62 | 1.85 | 84.17 | 92.34 | 95.06 | 1.51 |
| (a) Projection-head dimension | 256 | 4/7 | ✓ | 76.11 | 89.11 | 93.45 | 1.66 | 84.27 | 92.84 | 94.86 | 1.53 |
| 512 | 4/7 | ✓ | 77.32 | 88.31 | 92.74 | 1.74 | 84.48 | 92.44 | 94.76 | 1.59 | |
| 1024 | 4/7 | ✓ | 78.75 | 91.67 | 94.79 | 1.55 | 86.04 | 94.58 | 97.50 | 1.36 | |
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dataset | Protocol | Method | Generated-to-Target (Test set) | Generated-to-Source (Test set) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R@1 | R@2 | R@3 | AvgR | R@1 | R@2 | R@3 | AvgR | |||
| GT | 64.36 | 88.75 | 95.56 | 1.74 | 20.83 | 33.66 | 40.47 | 33.13 | ||
| GT (retargeted) | 64.34 | 88.73 | 95.55 | 1.73 | 20.82 | 33.65 | 40.47 | 33.12 | ||
| MotionFix | Seen | MDM ( Tevet et al., 2023 ) | 0.00 | 0.30 | 0.49 | 476.65 | 0.10 | 0.10 | 0.10 | 486.26 |
| MotionFix | Seen | MDM-BP ( Athanasiou et al., 2024 ) | 8.69 | 14.71 | 18.36 | 180.99 | 30.21 | 36.82 | 40.47 | 106.05 |
| MotionFix | Seen | TMED ( Athanasiou et al., 2024 ) | 14.51 | 21.72 | 28.73 | 56.63 | 22.41 | 34.45 | 40.57 | 31.42 |
| Protocol | Method | Alignment | Plausibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seen | GT | 2.53 0.66 | 2.61 0.69 |
| SimMotionEdit ( Li et al., 2025 ) | 2.08 0.81 | 2.28 0.76 | |
| TAME (ours) | 2.31 0.74 | 2.46 0.71 | |
| Unseen | GT | 2.53 0.66 | 2.61 0.69 |
| AnyTop ( Gat et al., 2025 ) | 1.73 0.84 | 1.98 0.81 | |
| TAME (ours) | 1.96 0.79 | 2.14 0.77 |
Human Motion Generation
Human motion generation creates articulated movement from language, audio, video, spatial constraints, or interaction goals.
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