Reactive dance generation (RDG), the task of generating a dance conditioned on a lead dancer's motion, holds significant promise for enhancing human-robot interaction and immersive digital entertainment. Despite progress in duet synchronization and motion-music alignment, two key challenges remain: generating fine-grained spatial interactions and ensuring long-term temporal coherence. In this work, we introduce \textbf{ReactDance}, a diffusion framework that operates on a novel hierarchical latent space to address these spatiotemporal challenges in RDG. First, for high-fidelity spatial expression and fine-grained control, we propose Hierarchical Finite Scalar Quantization (\textbf{HFSQ}). This multi-scale motion representation effectively disentangles coarse body posture from subtle limb dynamics, enabling independent and detailed control over both aspects through a layered guidance mechanism. Second, to efficiently generate long sequences with high temporal coherence, we propose Blockwise Local Context (\textbf{BLC}), a non-autoregressive sampling strategy. Departing from slow, frame-by-frame generation, BLC partitions the sequence into blocks and synthesizes them in parallel via periodic causal masking and positional encodings. Coherence across these blocks is ensured by a dense sliding-window training approach that enriches the representation with local temporal context. Extensive experiments show that ReactDance substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in motion quality, long-term coherence, and sampling efficiency.

Abstract-- Long-horizon, high-dynamic motion tracking on humanoids remains brittle because absolute joint commands cannot compensate model-plant mismatch, leading to error accumulation. We propose RobotDancing, a simple, scalable framework that predicts residual joint targets to explicitly correct dynamics discrepancies. The pipeline is end-to-end--training, sim-to-sim validation, and zero-shot sim-to-real--and uses a single-stage reinforcement learning (RL) setup with a unified observation, reward, and hyperparameter configuration. RobotDancing can track multi-minute, high-energy behaviors (jumps, spins, cartwheels) and deploys zero-shot to hardware with high motion tracking quality. I. INTRODUCTION Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to execute long-horizon, highly dynamic behaviors such as dance, where small tracking errors compound rapidly and destabilize control. A principal source of such drift is the mismatch between idealized reference trajectories and the robot's true physics (actuation limits, friction, inertia, latency).

Group dance generation from music has broad applications in film, gaming, and animation production. However, it requires synchronizing multiple dancers while maintaining spatial coordination. As the number of dancers and sequence length increase, this task faces higher computational complexity and a greater risk of motion collisions. Existing methods often struggle to model dense spatial-temporal interactions, leading to scalability issues and multi-dancer collisions. To address these challenges, we propose ST-GDance, a novel framework that decouples spatial and temporal dependencies to optimize long-term and collision-free group choreography. We employ lightweight graph convolutions for distance-aware spatial modeling and accelerated sparse attention for efficient temporal modeling. This design significantly reduces computational costs while ensuring smooth and collision-free interactions. Experiments on the AIOZ-GDance dataset demonstrate that ST-GDance outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in generating long and coherent group dance sequences. Project page: https://yilliajing.github.io/ST-GDance-Website/.

Modern artistic productions increasingly demand automated choreography generation that adapts to diverse musical styles and individual dancer characteristics. Existing approaches often fail to produce high-quality dance videos that harmonize with both musical rhythm and user-defined choreography styles, limiting their applicability in real-world creative contexts. To address this gap, we introduce ChoreoMuse, a diffusion-based framework that uses SMPL format parameters and their variation version as intermediaries between music and video generation, thereby overcoming the usual constraints imposed by video resolution. Critically, ChoreoMuse supports style-controllable, high-fidelity dance video generation across diverse musical genres and individual dancer characteristics, including the flexibility to handle any reference individual at any resolution. Our method employs a novel music encoder MotionTune to capture motion cues from audio, ensuring that the generated choreography closely follows the beat and expressive qualities of the input music. To quantitatively evaluate how well the generated dances match both musical and choreographic styles, we introduce two new metrics that measure alignment with the intended stylistic cues. Extensive experiments confirm that ChoreoMuse achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple dimensions, including video quality, beat alignment, dance diversity, and style adherence, demonstrating its potential as a robust solution for a wide range of creative applications. Video results can be found on our project page: https://choreomuse.github.io.

Automatically generating natural, diverse and rhythmic human dance movements driven by music is vital for virtual reality and film industries. However, generating dance that naturally follows music remains a challenge, as existing methods lack proper beat alignment and exhibit unnatural motion dynamics. In this paper, we propose Danceba, a novel framework that leverages gating mechanism to enhance rhythm-aware feature representation for music-driven dance generation, which achieves highly aligned dance poses with enhanced rhythmic sensitivity. Specifically, we introduce Phase-Based Rhythm Extraction (PRE) to precisely extract rhythmic information from musical phase data, capitalizing on the intrinsic periodicity and temporal structures of music. Additionally, we propose Temporal-Gated Causal Attention (TGCA) to focus on global rhythmic features, ensuring that dance movements closely follow the musical rhythm. We also introduce Parallel Mamba Motion Modeling (PMMM) architecture to separately model upper and lower body motions along with musical features, thereby improving the naturalness and diversity of generated dance movements. Extensive experiments confirm that Danceba outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significantly better rhythmic alignment and motion diversity. Project page: https://danceba.github.io/ .

Existing AI-generated dance methods primarily train on motion capture data from solo dance performances, but a critical feature of dance in nearly any genre is the interaction of two or more bodies in space. Moreover, many works at the intersection of AI and dance fail to incorporate the ideas and needs of the artists themselves into their development process, yielding models that produce far more useful insights for the AI community than for the dance community. This work addresses both needs of the field by proposing an AI method to model the complex interactions between pairs of dancers and detailing how the technical methodology can be shaped by ongoing co-creation with the artistic stakeholders who curated the movement data. Our model is a probability-and-attention-based Variational Autoencoder that generates a choreographic partner conditioned on an input dance sequence. We construct a custom loss function to enhance the smoothness and coherence of the generated choreography. Our code is open-source, and we also document strategies for other interdisciplinary research teams to facilitate collaboration and strong communication between artists and technologists.

Dance typically involves professional choreography with complex movements that follow a musical rhythm and can also be influenced by lyrical content. The integration of lyrics in addition to the auditory dimension, enriches the foundational tone and makes motion generation more amenable to its semantic meanings. However, existing dance synthesis methods tend to model motions only conditioned on audio signals. In this work, we make two contributions to bridge this gap. First, we propose LM2D, a novel probabilistic architecture that incorporates a multimodal diffusion model with consistency distillation, designed to create dance conditioned on both music and lyrics in one diffusion generation step. Second, we introduce the first 3D dance-motion dataset that encompasses both music and lyrics, obtained with pose estimation technologies. We evaluate our model against music-only baseline models with objective metrics and human evaluations, including dancers and choreographers. The results demonstrate LM2D is able to produce realistic and diverse dance matching both lyrics and music. A video summary can be accessed at: https://youtu.be/4XCgvYookvA.

This paper presents an Exploratory 3D Dance generation framework, E3D2, designed to address the exploration capability deficiency in existing music-conditioned 3D dance generation models. Current models often generate monotonous and simplistic dance sequences that misalign with human preferences because they lack exploration capabilities. The E3D2 framework involves a reward model trained from automatically-ranked dance demonstrations, which then guides the reinforcement learning process. This approach encourages the agent to explore and generate high quality and diverse dance movement sequences. The soundness of the reward model is both theoretically and experimentally validated. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of E3D2 on the AIST++ dataset. Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/e3d2.

Dancing with music is always an essential human art form to express emotion. Due to the high temporal-spacial complexity, long-term 3D realist dance generation synchronized with music is challenging. Existing methods suffer from the freezing problem when generating long-term dances due to error accumulation and training-inference discrepancy. To address this, we design a conditional diffusion model, LongDanceDiff, for this sequence-to-sequence long-term dance generation, addressing the challenges of temporal coherency and spatial constraint. LongDanceDiff contains a transformer-based diffusion model, where the input is a concatenation of music, past motions, and noised future motions. This partial noising strategy leverages the full-attention mechanism and learns the dependencies among music and past motions. To enhance the diversity of generated dance motions and mitigate the freezing problem, we introduce a mutual information minimization objective that regularizes the dependency between past and future motions. We also address common visual quality issues in dance generation, such as foot sliding and unsmooth motion, by incorporating spatial constraints through a Global-Trajectory Modulation (GTM) layer and motion perceptual losses, thereby improving the smoothness and naturalness of motion generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in our approach over the existing state-of-the-art methods. We plan to release our codes and models soon.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create dance choreography with intention is still at an early stage. Methods that conditionally generate dance sequences remain limited in their ability to follow choreographer-specific creative direction, often relying on external prompts or supervised learning. In the same vein, fully annotated dance datasets are rare and labor intensive. To fill this gap and help leverage deep learning as a meaningful tool for choreographers, we propose "PirouNet", a semi-supervised conditional recurrent variational autoencoder together with a dance labeling web application. PirouNet allows dance professionals to annotate data with their own subjective creative labels and subsequently generate new bouts of choreography based on their aesthetic criteria. Thanks to the proposed semi-supervised approach, PirouNet only requires a small portion of the dataset to be labeled, typically on the order of 1%. We demonstrate PirouNet's capabilities as it generates original choreography based on the "Laban Time Effort", an established dance notion describing intention for a movement's time dynamics. We extensively evaluate PirouNet's dance creations through a series of qualitative and quantitative metrics, validating its applicability as a tool for choreographers.