PhysibleMDM: Enforcing Inference-Time Physical Feasibility Constraints on Motion Diffusion Models via Noise Optimization

Motion Diffusion Models (MDMs) can generate diverse and visually appealing human motion; yet, the resulting trajectories frequently violate physical constraints, limiting their downstream use in simulation and control.

We present PhysibleMDM, a framework that promotes physical feasibility of MDM output by optimizing at inference time the diffusion noise without retraining the generative model.

We introduce a set of surrogate feasibility constraints that can be evaluated without full trajectory simulation.

These constraints combine kinematic checks (e.g., ground penetration, slip, and self-collision) with dynamic feasibility tests computed via an inverse-dynamics inner loop formulated as a cone program.

We solve the resulting black-box noise optimization problem using the Separable Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (Sep-CMA-ES), thereby avoiding reliance on computationally expensive and discontinuous gradients.

An autoregressive scheme then chains optimized segments to synthesize long motion sequences.

Across 100 motion styles on an SMPL humanoid, PhysibleMDM reduces mean ground penetration, self-collision penetration, and ground slip by 75%, 92%, and 74%, respectively, relative to unoptimized diffusion output.

Across 11 sequences for a custom bipedal robot, it achieves median reductions of 89.5% in per-sequence mean acceleration-reconstruction error and 79.5% in the mean inverse-dynamics residual.