arXiv · 2603.09930
Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interaction
Abstract
Text-motion retrieval aims to learn a semantically aligned latent space between natural language descriptions and 3D human motion skeleton sequences, enabling bidirectional search across the two modalities. Most existing methods use a dual-encoder framework that compresses motion and text into global embeddings, discarding fine-grained local correspondences, and thus reducing accuracy. Additionally, these global-embedding methods offer limited interpretability of the retrieval results. To overcome these limitations, we propose an interpretable, joint-angle-based motion representation that maps joint-level local features into a structured pseudo-image, compatible with pre-trained Vision Transformers. For text-to-motion retrieval, we employ MaxSim, a token-wise late interaction mechanism, and enhance it with Masked Language Modeling regularization to foster robust, interpretable text-motion alignment. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art text-motion retrieval approaches while offering interpretable fine-grained correspondences between text and motion. The code is available in the supplementary material.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Yao Zhang, Zhuchenyang Liu, Yanlan He, Thomas Ploetz, Yu Xiao. 2026-03-10. Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interaction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09930
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.