Programmable Motion Generation for Open-Set Motion Control Tasks

Hanchao Liu, Xiaohang Zhan, Shaoli Huang, Tai-Jiang Mu, Ying Shan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1399-1408

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints such as trajectories key-frames interactions etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. These methods are often specialized and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this we introduce a new paradigm programmable motion generation. In this paradigm any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the requirements of the compounded constraints. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics geometric constraints physical laws interactions with scenes objects or the character's own body parts etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.