Abstract:
Humanoid control in animation and robotics requires physically realistic motion as well as the ability to adapt, coordinate actions over time, and make decisions in response to changing environments and other agents. Human motion data provides a powerful source of prior knowledge for learning natural and stable movement, but many existing approaches rely on reference motions in ways that are difficult to generalize beyond demonstrated scenarios. As a result, it remains challenging for humanoid agents to reuse and compose skills over time, limiting their ability to operate in interactive and competitive environments.

This thesis investigates how human motion references can be used more flexibly, not as strict templates to be reproduced, but as behavioral priors that shape how agents move while allowing adaptation to new tasks and conditions. Rather than focusing on the replication of specific motions, the emphasis is placed on learning reusable structure from human behavior that supports robustness and generalization across diverse goals, environments, and interactions. Through this perspective, humanoid agents can preserve natural movement while remaining responsive to novel objectives and disturbances.

Building on this foundation, the thesis extends beyond single-agent skill execution to study higher-level behavior in interactive and competitive settings. Domains such as sports highlight that strong motor skills alone are insufficient: successful performance also depends on selecting appropriate actions, timing them effectively, and coordinating behavior over longer time horizons in response to both the environment and other agents. Overall, this work presents a unified view of humanoid control in which reference motion supports generalization rather than constraining behavior, and enables adaptive and strategic interaction in both animation and robotics.

Thesis Committee:
Jessica Hodgins, chair
Deva Ramanan
Guanya Shi,
Xue Bin Peng, Simon Fraser University, NVIDIA
Taku Komura, The University of Hong Kong

A draft of the thesis proposal document is available here.