arXiv subjects

Zixi Kang

Publications and source records attributed to Zixi Kang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MuGen: Multi-Skill Generative Locomotion Controller for Humanoid Robots

This paper presents MuGen, a data-driven framework for learning and deploying multi-skill locomotion on humanoid robots. MuGen enables a robot to perform expressive motions like humans under the guidance of example motion sequences. To achieve this, we employ vector-quantized autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) trained with model-based reinforcement learning, resulting in a generative representation of locomotion that captures key patterns of human motion from hours of heterogeneous human performance data. We employ a teacher-student learning framework and develop a new policy distillation strategy to enable a deployable student policy learning this efficient latent representation. This policy allows the robot to track and mimic unseen human motions and further enables the robot to reuse the learned latent space for other tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through a diverse set of motions and accurate execution.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

ProAct: Harnessing Streaming Motion Generation and Agentic Reasoning for Real-Time Embodied Social Interaction

Real-time embodied social interaction places two equally demanding requirements on an agent: continuously generating fluent multimodal interaction behavior, and proactively reasoning over accumulated dialogue and visual context to decide when to take initiative. These requirements must both be satisfied under a strict latency budget, making them difficult to meet simultaneously. We present ProAct, a dual-system framework that manages these time-critical requirements by integrating a low-latency Behavioral System for streaming multimodal interaction with a slower Cognitive System that performs long-horizon social reasoning and produces high-level proactive intentions. The Cognitive System incorporates an efficient memory mechanism and a user-motivation prediction module to reason over accumulated dialogue and visual context and determine when proactive intervention is appropriate. The Behavioral System further includes an intention-conditioned streaming flow-matching motion generator with a disentangled ControlNet branch, which translates deliberative intentions into continuous non-verbal behavior without disrupting interaction fluency. We deploy ProAct on a physical humanoid robot and validate the framework through comprehensive experiments, including real-world user studies, motion-generation benchmarks, and evaluation on ProActBench, a new, targeted benchmark for evaluating proactive trigger detection and restraint in embodied interaction.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

OpenDance: Multimodal Controllable 3D Dance Generation with Large-scale Internet Data

Music-driven 3D dance generation offers significant creative potential, yet practical applications demand versatile and multimodal control. As the highly dynamic and complex human motion covering various styles and genres, dance generation requires satisfying diverse conditions beyond just music (e.g., spatial trajectories, keyframe gestures, or style descriptions). However, the absence of a large-scale and richly annotated dataset severely hinders progress. In this paper, we build OpenDanceSet, an extensive human dance dataset comprising over 100 hours across 14 genres and 147 subjects. Each sample has rich annotations to facilitate robust cross-modal learning: 3D motion, paired music, 2D keypoints, trajectories, and expert-annotated text descriptions. Furthermore, we propose OpenDanceNet, a unified masked modeling framework for controllable dance generation, including a disentangled auto-encoder and a multimodal joint-prediction Transformer. OpenDanceNet supports generation conditioned on music and arbitrary combinations of text, keypoints, or trajectories. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our work achieves high-fidelity synthesis with strong diversity and realistic physical contacts, while also offering flexible control over spatial and stylistic conditions. Project Page: https://open-dance.github.io

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Text-controlled Motion Mamba: Text-Instructed Temporal Grounding of Human Motion

Human motion understanding is a fundamental task with diverse practical applications, facilitated by the availability of large-scale motion capture datasets. Recent studies focus on text-motion tasks, such as text-based motion generation, editing and question answering. In this study, we introduce the novel task of text-based human motion grounding (THMG), aimed at precisely localizing temporal segments corresponding to given textual descriptions within untrimmed motion sequences. Capturing global temporal information is crucial for the THMG task. However, Transformer-based models that rely on global temporal self-attention face challenges when handling long untrimmed sequences due to the quadratic computational cost. We address these challenges by proposing Text-controlled Motion Mamba (TM-Mamba), a unified model that integrates temporal global context, language query control, and spatial graph topology with only linear memory cost. The core of the model is a text-controlled selection mechanism which dynamically incorporates global temporal information based on text query. The model is further enhanced to be topology-aware through the integration of relational embeddings. For evaluation, we introduce BABEL-Grounding, the first text-motion dataset that provides detailed textual descriptions of human actions along with their corresponding temporal segments. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of TM-Mamba on BABEL-Grounding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Biomechanics-Guided Residual Approach to Generalizable Human Motion Generation and Estimation

Human pose, action, and motion generation are critical for applications in digital humans, character animation, and humanoid robotics. However, many existing methods struggle to produce physically plausible movements that are consistent with biomechanical principles. Although recent autoregressive and diffusion models deliver impressive visual quality, they often neglect key biodynamic features and fail to ensure physically realistic motions. Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches can address these shortcomings but are highly dependent on simulation environments, limiting their generalizability. To overcome these challenges, we propose BioVAE, a biomechanics-aware framework with three core innovations: (1) integration of muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints to enable physically plausible motion without simulations; (2) seamless coupling with diffusion models for stable end-to-end training; and (3) biomechanical priors that promote strong generalization across diverse motion generation and estimation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BioVAE achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, bridging the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity while setting new standards for physically accurate motion generation and pose estimation.

cs.CV↗