MIME: Multimodal Interactive Motion Encoder

Abstract

Text-motion representation learning has advanced rapidly, with growing interest in multi person interactions for animation, AR/VR, and embodied AI. These settings require representations that align language with both individual actor dynamics and the relationships between actors. We introduce the Multimodal Interactive Motion Encoder (MIME), which, to our knowledge, represents the first dedicated multimodal encoder designed specifically for two person interactive motion. MIME captures individual and shared structure using stream based co-attention with explicit interaction features and curriculum based contrastive training. On Inter-X text-motion retrieval, MIME consistently outperforms early and late fusion baselines across gallery sizes, achieving a 12.8% relative improvement in text-to-motion R@1 at a 2,000-sample gallery. We further evaluate MIME as a frozen auxiliary prior within TIMotion and InterMask on the unseen InterHuman dataset. MIME improves semantic alignment metrics while maintaining comparable FID in TIMotion. These results show that interaction aware multimodal encoding improves multi person motion retrieval and transfers across datasets to support downstream motion generation.