MUGEN: A Unified Framework for Efficient Motion Understanding and Generation

Grounding human motion in language, and language in motion, is a central step toward physical AI systems that can understand, generate, and communicate human behavior. Unified motion--language systems first coupled the two directions through a shared discrete motion codebook, but quantization limits generation quality. The strongest generators buy quality back at growing cost: stacked residual codebooks enlarge the representation; masked decoding stages, long autoregressive rollouts, and denoising chains of tens to hundreds of steps stretch inference; even the continuous-latent designs among them reach their latent only through an iterative diffusion head; and none of this decoding machinery serves understanding. We therefore propose MUGEN, a unified motion--language framework that pays neither cost: no codebook, one draw. A single adaptive-length autoencoder compresses any-length motion into a few continuous latent slots, the system's only motion representation: the language model generates them for text-to-motion and reads them back for motion understanding. Depth-routed hidden states let each slot read from the transformer depth it needs, and a calibrated head predicts a joint distribution over the full latent set, so a single draw carries the text-conditional, cross-slot variation a description permits. At a decoding cost of K language-model steps, one draw, and one decoder pass, MUGEN leads language-model baselines on FID on HumanML3D while raising retrieval precision above the real-motion reference under the standard evaluator, achieves the best CIDEr and BLEU@4 scores, and surpasses the discrete-token state of the art on every retrieval and alignment metric on SnapMoGen.

Towards Continual Motion-Language Agents: LoRA Variants for Incremental Motion Understanding and Generation

Motion-language agents must possess the bidirectional capability to both understand human movement (motion-to-text, M2T) and generate it from natural language (text-to-motion, T2M). While foundational models have achieved strong performance in static settings, autonomous agents operating in dynamic environments must continuously incorporate new motion concepts -- such as novel athletic styles or specialized gestures -- without catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired skills. We investigate the stability-plasticity trade-off in bidirectional motion-language learning under sequential task exposure. Building on a frozen large language model backbone, we introduce low-rank adaptation (LoRA) variants designed to mitigate inter-task interference. We specifically propose mixture-of-experts architectures that utilize an autoencoder-based router to select task-specific experts at inference time, so that no task-label is needed. To evaluate these methods, we establish a reproducible five-task benchmark derived from HumanML3D through semantic clustering of motion descriptions. Our experimental results demonstrate near-zero forgetting across both M2T and T2M directions while maintaining high generation and captioning quality. Furthermore, we show that hard expert selection via routing significantly outperforms soft expert blending in quality metrics, indicating that preserving expert isolation is critical for maintaining performance in our continual learning setting. Finally, we observe that a divergence between token-level accuracy and downstream generation quality may occur, highlighting the need for more comprehensive evaluation protocols in future research on lifelong motion-language agents.

AnyMo: Geometry-Aware Setup-Agnostic Modeling of Human Motion in the Wild

As wearable and mobile devices become increasingly embedded in daily life, they offer a practical way to continuously sense human motion in the wild. But inertial signals are highly dependent on the sensing setup, including body location, mounting position, sensor orientation, device hardware, and sampling protocol. This setup dependence makes it difficult to learn motion representations that transfer across devices and datasets, and limits the broader use of wearable IMUs beyond closed-set recognition. We introduce AnyMo, a geometry-aware framework for setup-agnostic human motion modeling. AnyMo uses physics-grounded IMU simulation over dense body-surface placements to generate diverse and plausible synthetic signals, pre-trains a graph encoder from paired synthetic placement views and masked partial observations, tokenizes multi-position IMU into full-body motion tokens, and aligns these tokens with an LLM for motion-language understanding. We evaluate AnyMo on three complementary tasks: zero-shot activity recognition across 14 unseen downstream datasets, cross-modal retrieval, and wearable IMU motion captioning, where it improves average Accuracy/F1/R@2 by 11.7\%/11.6\%/22.6\% on HAR, increases zero-shot IMU-to-text and text-to-IMU retrieval MRR by 15.9\% and 28.6\%, respectively, and improves zero-shot captioning BERT-F1 by 18.8\%. These results support AnyMo as a generalist model for wearable motion understanding in the wild. Project page: https://baiyuchen.com/project/AnyMo.