Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Duke University · University of California, Berkeley
Dance motion combines slowly varying body configurations with rapid local movements. We investigate how explicit temporal-frequency decomposition can guide the temporal resolution and codebook capacity of discrete motion representations. We introduce frequency-factorized motion tokenization (FFMT), which separates root-relative motion into a low-frequency choreographic scaffold and a complementary high-frequency residual. FFMT uses a lower token rate and a smaller codebook for the low-frequency component, and a higher token rate and a larger codebook for the high-frequency residual. This representation further induces a plan-then-articulate autoregressive factorization: low-frequency tokens establish coarse choreography, while high-frequency tokens realize local motion details conditioned on the generated plan and music. Experiments on AIST++ and FineDance show strong distributional fidelity while preserving realistic diversity and music--motion synchronization. Ablations consistently support frequency factorization, asymmetric temporal allocation, and low-to-high conditioning.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of FFMT. (a) Frequency-factorized tokenization assigns different temporal resolutions and codebook sizes to low-frequency structure and high-frequency residuals, with separate upper/lower-body codebooks. (b) Plan-then-articulate generation predicts low-frequency tokens first and conditions high-frequency generation on the aligned low-frequency context and music. The resulting tokens are decoded into rotations and root motion, with a training-derived prior used during inference.
Method
FID k↓
FID g↓
Div k→
Div g→
BAS →
AIST++
Ground Truth
–
–
8.19
7.45
0.2374
Bailando++ [ 11 ]
21.29
11.56
9.31
6.20
0.2330
EDGE [ 12 ]
42.16
22.12
3.96
4.61
0.2334
Lodge [ 5 ]
37.09
18.79
5.58
4.85
0.2423
TokenDance [ 13 ]
21.55
11.85
8.05
7.12
0.2313
Table 1: Comparison on AIST++ and FineDance. ↓ : lower is better; → : closer to GT is better. Bold/underline indicate the best/second-best reported values for each dataset.
AIST++
FineDance
Variant
FID k
FID g
Div k
Div g
BAS
FID k
FID g
Div k
Div g
BAS
w/o Freq.
28.74
10.43
6.06
6.08
0.216
56.82
49.68
7.38
10.17
0.202
Same Rate
18.92
9.88
8.84
6.26
0.260
48.01
36.34
8.87
6.82
0.219
Uniform K
15.16
9.25
8.39
6.18
0.249
39.46
30.07
8.74
7.05
0.220
w/o L → H
55.27
24.56
8.71
6.39
0.256
140.77
48.93
4.95
11.27
0.224
w/o Prior
13.14
7.34
8.63
6.48
0.253
35.39
27.84
9.10
7.78
0.215
Table 2: Generation ablations on AIST++ and FineDance. Lower FID is better; diversity and BAS are better when closer to ground truth.
AIST++
FineDance
Variant
MPJPE ↓
EH↓
EA↓
MPJPE ↓
EH↓
EA↓
w/o Freq.
96.647
0.7338
17.144
95.903
0.4280
7.332
Same Rate
96.797
0.7175
17.287
93.101
0.4013
7.248
Uniform K
95.518
0.6862
16.934
92.637
0.3743
6.719
Full
94.459
0.5514
15.070
88.770
0.3190
5.256
Table 3: Tokenizer reconstruction ablations. MPJPE: mm; EH : dimensionless; EA : m/s 2 . Lower is better; bold marks the best values.
Most human motion generation methods encode motion as tokens on a uniform temporal grid, where every token spans the same fixed time window. Human motion, however, is temporally heterogeneous: slowly evolving global trajectories coexist with rapid transient events such as foot contacts and joint impulses. Forcing such multi-scale dynamics onto tokens of identical temporal resolution entangles motion frequencies, leaving slow regions redundant while smoothing out the rapid details that distinguish realistic motion. We propose FreqMo, a scale-adaptive motion representation that decomposes motion into wavelet frequency bands, separating dynamics across temporal scales while preserving temporal localization and exact reconstruction. Unified Frequency Residual Quantization (UFRQ) then encodes all bands within a single shared codebook, compressing the token sequence threefold and enabling stable single-stage generation. Experiments show FreqMo attains SOTA fidelity with substantially improved high-frequency preservation, and the same decomposition transfers to continuous diffusion backbones.
Music-to-dance generation aims to translate auditory signals into expressive human motion, with broad applications in virtual reality, choreography, and digital entertainment. Despite promising progress, the limited generation efficiency of existing methods leaves insufficient computational headroom for high-fidelity 3D rendering, thereby constraining the expressiveness of 3D characters during real-world applications. Thus, we propose FlowerDance, which not only generates refined motion with physical plausibility and artistic expressiveness, but also achieves significant generation efficiency on inference speed and memory utilization. Specifically, FlowerDance combines MeanFlow with Physical Consistency Constraints, which enables high-quality motion generation with only a few sampling steps. Moreover, FlowerDance leverages a simple but efficient model architecture with BiMamba-based backbone and Channel-Level Cross-Modal Fusion, which generates dance with efficient non-autoregressive manner. Meanwhile, FlowerDance supports motion editing, enabling users to interactively refine dance sequences. Extensive experiments on AIST++ and FineDance show that FlowerDance achieves state-of-the-art results in both motion quality and generation efficiency. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang, Ziqiao Peng +4
Renmin University of China · Malou Tech Inc · Wuhan University +1
Music-to-dance generation has broad applications in virtual reality, dance education, and digital character animation. However, the limited coverage of existing 3D dance datasets confines current models to a narrow subset of music styles and choreographic patterns, resulting in poor generalization to real-world music. Consequently, generated dances often become overly simplistic and repetitive, substantially degrading expressiveness and realism. To tackle this problem, we present TokenDance, a two-stage music-to-dance generation framework that explicitly addresses this limitation through dual-modality tokenization and efficient token-level generation. In the first stage, we discretize both dance and music using Finite Scalar Quantization, where dance motions are factorized into upper and lower-body components with kinematic-dynamic constraints, and music is decomposed into semantic and acoustic features with dedicated codebooks to capture choreography-specific structures. In the second stage, we introduce a Local-Global-Local token-to-token generator built on a Bidirectional Mamba backbone, enabling coherent motion synthesis, strong music-dance alignment, and efficient non-autoregressive inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TokenDance achieves overall state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both generation quality and inference speed, highlighting its effectiveness and practical value for real-world music-to-dance applications.
Ziyue Yang, Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang
Brown University · Renmin University of China · The University of Texas at Dallas