Paper · arXiv 2511.05369
Dense Motion Captioning
Shiyao Xu, Benedetta Liberatori, Gül Varol, Paolo Rota
A new task, Dense Motion Captioning, is introduced with a large-scale dataset, CompMo, and a model, DEMO, that integrates a language model with a motion adapter to generate detailed, temporally grounded captions for 3D human motion sequences.
Abstract
Recent advances in 3D human motion and language integration have primarily focused on text-to-motion generation, leaving the task of motion understanding relatively unexplored. We introduce Dense Motion Captioning, a novel task that aims to temporally localize and caption actions within 3D human motion sequences. Current datasets fall short in providing detailed temporal annotations and predominantly consist of short sequences featuring few actions. To overcome these limitations, we present the Complex Motion Dataset (CompMo), the first large-scale dataset featuring richly annotated, complex motion sequences with precise temporal boundaries. Built through a carefully designed data generation pipeline, CompMo includes 60,000 motion sequences, each composed of multiple actions ranging from at least two to ten, accurately annotated with their temporal extents. We further present DEMO, a model that integrates a large language model with a simple motion adapter, trained to generate dense, temporally grounded captions. Our experiments show that DEMO substantially outperforms existing methods on CompMo as well as on adapted benchmarks, establishing a robust baseline for future research in 3D motion understanding and captioning.