3D Human Motion Prediction via the Decoupled Spatiotemporal Clue

Human motion exhibits high-dimensional and stochastic characteristics, posing significant challenges for modeling and prediction. Existing approaches typically employ coupled spatiotemporal frameworks to generate future poses. However, the intrinsic nonlinearity of joint interactions over time, compounded by high-dimensional noise, often obscures meaningful motion features. Notably, while adjacent joints demonstrate strong spatial correlations, their temporal trajectories frequently remain independent, adding further complexity to modeling efforts. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for human motion prediction via the decoupled spatiotemporal clue (DSC), which explicitly disentangles and models spatial and temporal dependencies. Specifically, DSC comprises two core components: (i) a spatiotemporal decoupling module that dynamically identifies critical joints and their hierarchical relationships using graph attention combined with separable convolutions for efficient motion decomposition; and (ii) a pose generation module that integrates local motion denoising with global dynamics modeling through a spatiotemporal transformer that independently processes spatial and temporal correlations. Experiments on the widely used human motion datasets H3.6M and AMASS demonstrate the superiority of DSC, which achieves 13% average improvement in long-term prediction over state-of-the-art methods.