SPARD: Single-step Inference with Adaptive Sampling in Residual Diffusion for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract The task of stochastic human motion prediction has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its wide-ranging applications in robotics, animation, and human-computer interaction. While diffusion models have demonstrated promising progress in this domain, they remain hindered by two critical limitations: (1) slow inference speeds due to their reliance on iterative sampling, and (2) performance degradation resulting from suboptimal sample allocation during generation. To overcome these challenges, we propose SPARD (Single-step Inference with Adaptive Sampling in Residual Diffusion for Human Motion Prediction), a novel framework that achieves efficient single-step inference while maintaining high predictive accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a novel adaptive noise predictor module that dynamically samples latent representations based on observed motion sequences, ensuring both accuracy and plausibility in generated motions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both inference efficiency and motion quality, achieving a 15× to 18× speedup in sampling time compared to conventional diffusion-based baselines while preserving generation quality.