MoRL: Reinforced Reasoning for Unified Motion Understanding and Generation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission15790 Authors

Keywords: human motion, motion understanding, motion generation

Abstract: Human motion understanding and generation are crucial for vision and robotics but remain limited in reasoning capability and test-time planning. We propose MoRL, a unified multimodal motion model trained with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Our task-specific reward design combines semantic alignment and reasoning coherence for understanding with physical plausibility and text–motion consistency for generation, improving both logical reasoning and perceptual realism. To further enhance inference, we introduce Chain-of-Motion (CoM), a test-time reasoning method that enables step-by-step planning and reflection. We also construct two large-scale CoT datasets, MoUnd-CoT-140K and MoGen-CoT-140K, to align motion sequences with reasoning traces and action descriptions. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that MoRL achieves significant gains over state-of-the-art baselines.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 15790