Title: KinemaDiff: Towards Diffusion for Coherent and Physically Plausible Human Motion Prediction
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: Stochastic Human Motion Prediction (HMP) has become an essential task for the realm of computer vision, for its capacity to anticipate accurate and diverse future human trajectories. Current diffusion-based techniques typically enforce skeletal consistency by encoding structural priors into network architectures. Although effective in promoting plausible kinematics, this approach provides only indirect control over the generative process and often fails to guarantee strict physical constraint satisfaction. In this work, we propose a structure-aligned and joint-aware diffusion framework that enforces physical constraints by embedding skeletal topology and joint-specific dynamics directly into the diffusion process. Specifically, our framework consists of two key modules, the Joint-Adaptive Noise Generator and the Structure-Aligned Constraint Enforcer. The former component, Joint-Adaptive Noise Generator, infers joint-specific dynamics and injects
heterogeneous, instance-aware noise per joint and sample to capture spatial variability and enhance motion diversity. The latter component, Structure-Aligned Constraint Enforcer, encodes skeletal topology by modeling joint connectivity and bone lengths from historical motions, and it constrains each denoising step to preserve anatomical consistency. Through their synergistic operation, these modules grant KinemaDiff direct control over physical realism and motion diversity, addressing the common limitations of indirect structural priors and uniform noise application. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, attributable to tailoring the diffusion process through structural alignment and joint-adaptive noise modeling.