Sonic-AMGStreaming Human Motion Generation from Spatial Audio

Jingcheng Ni1Zekun Li1Zhiyang Dou2Xiaoyan Cong1Ziyao Zeng3Hongyang Du1Randall Balestriero1Taku Komura4Srinath Sridhar1*

1Brown University2MIT3Yale University4The University of Hong Kong

arXivCodeComing soon
Paper teaser: a continuous stereo waveform above purple, blue, and gold jointed characters reacting to music, an explosion, and birdsong

Abstract

Modeling human reactions to spatial audio requires understanding both what is heard and where it comes from. Prior work generates motion offline from complete acoustic and spatial input sequences. Humans, however, react to sounds without knowing what they will hear next. We present Sonic-AMG, the first autoregressive framework for generating human motion from streaming spatial audio. The model encodes acoustic content and body-relative source geometry as separate tokens. A causal transformer with a flow head generates continuous motion latents, which a causal decoder reconstructs into motion segments. Teacher-forced training uses motion histories and body-relative source locations derived from recorded motion, whereas streaming inference relies on generated motion for both. We introduce rehearsal training, which combines full-sequence teacher-forced supervision with supervised prediction on histories constructed through short autoregressive self-rollouts, improving robustness to accumulated prediction errors. To keep spatial conditioning consistent with generated motion, we propose spatial feedback, which recomputes body-relative source locations from generated root poses during both rehearsal training and inference. On SAM, Sonic-AMG achieves state-of-the-art FID and R-precision. It further supports real-time online generation of coherent reactions across sound events and source locations. Our code and model will be released upon acceptance.

Method

What is heard. Where it comes from.
A causal model connects both to the next movement.

One causal generation step

Acoustic content and body-relative source geometry are encoded as separate tokens. Both condition the next motion prediction.

The architecture

Sonic-AMG architecture with separate what and where tokens, a causal transformer, a flow head, and spatial feedback

Separate what & where tokens

Acoustic and spatial conditions retain dedicated representations and interact within the causal transformer.

Rehearsal training

Teacher-forced supervision is combined with prediction from short autoregressive self-rollouts.

Spatial feedback

Source coordinates are updated from the generated root pose, keeping spatial conditions consistent with the moving body.

Results

Continuous reactions.
From spatial audio to physical motion.

Motion quality on SAM

GT and Online spatial conditioning.

Sonic-AMG vs. MOSPA21.1%lower FID

Improved distributional fidelity, with support for causal generation.

FID · lower is better

MOSPA8.242
Sonic-AMG6.505
02.557.510
SAM quantitative comparison with GT and Online spatial conditioning. FID is lower-is-better; R-precision is higher-is-better; Diversity should approach real motion.
MethodCausalEval. SSLFID ↓R@1 ↑R@2 ↑R@3 ↑Diversity
GT motion†——0.0011.000±0.0001.000±0.0001.000±0.00023.616±0.188
EDGE†NoGT13.9930.886±0.0050.960±0.0030.977±0.00223.099±0.196
POPDG†NoGT20.9670.762±0.0060.886±0.0050.934±0.00322.536±0.170
LODGE†NoGT102.2890.444±0.0060.594±0.0050.679±0.00421.101±0.141
Bailando†NoGT168.3960.077±0.0030.134±0.0030.182±0.00417.347±0.247
MOSPANoGT8.2420.942±0.0040.984±0.0020.994±0.00123.412±0.169
Sonic-AMG (Ours)YesGT6.5050.957±0.0040.991±0.0020.998±0.00123.241±0.158
Sonic-AMG (Ours)YesOnline8.0660.943±0.0040.984±0.0020.994±0.00123.194±0.149

GT uses spatial cues from recorded motion; Online updates them from generated motion. R-precision and Diversity report mean ± 95% confidence intervals. Diversity is compared with real motion. † Results reported by Xu et al. (2025).

Respond while
the audio is arriving.

Sonic-AMG starts reacting before the recording ends and keeps generating for its full duration. MOSPA waits for the complete input and produces a fixed 8-second motion.

Sonic-AMG184 ms
MOSPA10,846 ms

First-frame latency on NVIDIA RTX A6000.
Approximately 59× lower with Sonic-AMG.

MOSPA

Fixed 8 s output

Sonic-AMG (ours)

Full clip · 11.83 s
Open video

From one sound
to the next.

Music, an explosion, then birdsong. One continuous motion stream follows changing sounds and source locations—even though training uses individual audio–motion clips.

Human motion

Open video

Humanoid simulation

Open video

Different sounds.
Different reactions.

Covering the ears, swatting at insects, and gesturing to speech: Sonic-AMG generates varied whole-body reactions to everyday sounds.

From generated motion
to a humanoid.

Sound-driven human motions transfer to a Unitree G1 in physical simulation, turning generated reactions into robot motion under gravity and ground contact.

Retargeted with GMR; tracked in MuJoCo by the pretrained GEAR-SONIC controller. These are offline physical rollouts.

Motion sequence

Full resolution ↗