Title: MoReFlow: Motion Retargeting Learning through Unsupervised Flow Matching
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: Motion Retarget, Motion Representation, Flow Matching, unsupervised learning

Abstract: Motion retargeting holds a premise of offering a larger set of motion data for characters and robots with different morphologies. Many prior works have approached this problem via either handcrafted constraints or paired motion datasets, limiting their applicability to humanoid characters or narrow behaviors such as locomotion. Moreover, they often assume a fixed notion of retargeting, overlooking domain-specific objectives like style preservation in animation or task-space alignment in robotics. In this work, we propose MoReFlow, Motion Retargeting via Flow Matching, an unsupervised framework that learns correspondences between characters’ motion embedding spaces. Our method consists of two stages. First, we train tokenized motion embeddings for each character using a VQ-VAE, yielding compact latent representations. Then, we employ flow matching with conditional coupling to align the latent spaces across characters, which simultaneously learns conditioned and unconditioned matching to achieve robust but flexible retargeting. Once trained, MoReFlow enables flexible and reversible retargeting without requiring paired data. Experiments demonstrate that MoReFlow produces high-quality motions across diverse characters and tasks, offering improved controllability, generalization, and motion realism compared to the baselines.

TL;DR: unsupervised flow-matching alignment of VQ-VAE motion tokens enabling flexible, reversible cross-character retargeting—no paired data