MotionPyramid: Controllable Motion Synthesis via Stylized Phase Manifolds

We introduce stylized phase manifolds—a compact, interpretable latent representation that disentangles motion content (e.g., “jumping”, “walking”), the temporal structure (e.g., motion cycle frequency, gait timing), and style (i.e., how the motion is performed). Learned in an unsupervised manner and inherently low-dimensional, the manifold offers intuitive and flexible editing. Building on this representation, we develop a diffusion-based motion generator that enables fine-grained control over semantic, temporal, and stylistic aspects of motion. To connect high-level intent with low-level motion, we treat the stylized manifold as an intermediate representation—a structured bridge between natural language and motion. By first mapping text into this manifold, our two-stage pipeline improves control over text-based motion generation, while producing high-quality, diverse motion outputs.

ACM Transactions on Graphics