Optimizing Diffusion Noise Can Serve As Universal Motion Priors

We propose Diffusion Noise Optimization (DNO), a new method that effectively leverages existing motion diffusion models as motion priors for a wide range of motion-related tasks. Instead of training a task-specific diffusion model for each new task, DNO operates by optimizing the diffusion latent noise of an existing pre-trained text-to-motion model. Given the corresponding latent noise of a human motion, it propagates the gradient from the target criteria defined on the motion space through the whole denoising process to update the diffusion latent noise. As a result, DNO supports any use cases where criteria can be defined as a function of motion. In particular, we show that, for motion editing and control, DNO outperforms existing methods in both achieving the objective and preserving the motion content. DNO accommodates a diverse range of editing modes, including changing trajectory, pose, joint locations, or avoiding newly added obstacles. In addition, DNO is effective in motion denoising and completion, producing smooth and realistic motion from noisy and partial inputs. DNO achieves these results at inference time without the need for model retraining, offering great versatility for any defined reward or loss function on the motion representation.