SCRIPT: Scalable Diffusion PoliCy with Multi-stage TRaining for
Language-drIven Physics-Based Humanoid ConTrol

Jingyan Zhang1, Han Liang2,†, Ruichi Zhang3, Bin Li1, Juze Zhang4, Xin Chen2, Jingya Wang1, Lan Xu1, Jingyi Yu1,‡
1ShanghaiTech University   2Bytedance Seed   3University of Pennsylvania   4Stanford University
Project leader   Corresponding author
SCRIPT teaser: language-driven physics-based humanoid control

Abstract

Controlling physics-based humanoids from natural-language instructions is a critical step toward general-purpose embodied agents. However, existing methods remain constrained by a tension between semantic expressiveness and physical feasibility, often failing to jointly achieve faithful instruction following, high-quality motion, and stable long-horizon control. We propose SCRIPT, a scalable diffusion policy with a multi-stage training framework for language-driven physics-based humanoid control. The core of SCRIPT is a Joint Action-State-Text Diffusion Transformer (JAST-DiT), which represents actions, physical states, and text as dedicated token streams and couples them through joint attention, enabling direct interaction between language semantics and control dynamics. To stabilize autoregressive control, we introduce a nonlinear history conditioning mechanism, which preserves the dense recent context and samples increasingly sparse cues from long-term history. Beyond supervised imitation pre-training, we propose a post-training stage using Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid Rewards (RLHR). By injecting learnable noise into the flow-sampling process, RLHR improves motion quality and instruction following within closed-loop simulations using hybrid physical feedback and text rewards. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that SCRIPT outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods across text alignment, motion quality, and physical realism. Furthermore, scaling studies on the 1200-hour MotionMillion dataset show consistent gains with model scaling, highlighting SCRIPT's robust scalability for large-scale pre-training.

Method

SCRIPT is a multi-stage framework. Stage I pre-trains a flow-matching diffusion policy, and Stage II applies RL post-training via PPO with hybrid rewards. JAST-DiT jointly models action, state, and text tokens through separate streams with joint attention.

SCRIPT method / pipeline overview

Qualitative Results

SCRIPT follows language prompts faithfully while maintaining physical plausibility, generating diverse humanoid motions spanning locomotion, sports, dance, and everyday actions.

Comparison

We compare SCRIPT against three physics-based humanoid-control baselines on HumanML3D, across text–motion alignment, motion quality, and physical plausibility.

Method R-Precision Motion Quality Physics
Top-1 ↑Top-2 ↑Top-3 ↑ FID ↓MM-Dist ↓Diversity → Floating ↓Jerk ↓Duration ↑
Phys-GT 0.6510.8150.882 0.0001.7001.494 17.492.941100.00%
PDP 0.2060.3240.416 1.5362.6661.335 27.193.04789.54%
UniPhys 0.1430.2420.326 0.4872.7501.447 19.672.03692.55%
CLoSD 0.3700.5370.641 0.7282.2911.444 20.712.76794.81%
SCRIPT Stage I 0.4290.5950.689 0.2032.1121.462 17.851.72397.67%
SCRIPT Stage II 0.4350.5990.693 0.1642.1231.486 17.611.70698.08%

SCRIPT ranks first across alignment, quality, and physics. Stage II (RL post-training) further lowers FID and improves Diversity and physical metrics while R-Precision stays stable — physical refinement without semantic loss. Phys-GT is the replayed ground-truth reference (upper bound), not a competing method. Arrows: ↑ higher is better, ↓ lower is better, → closer to ground truth is better.

Scaling on MotionMillion

We train three variants from 0.2B to 1.2B parameters on the 1200-hour MotionMillion dataset.

Method R-Precision Motion Quality
Top-1 ↑Top-2 ↑Top-3 ↑ FID ↓MM-Dist ↓Diversity →
GT 0.7070.8340.886 0.0002.8642.335
Base206.31M 0.3960.5440.633 1.0573.7382.251
Large577.97M 0.4370.5910.680 0.7763.6252.262
Huge1231.39M 0.4640.6160.701 0.6453.5542.287

Every metric improves monotonically from Base → Large → Huge, confirming that SCRIPT scales with model capacity.

Qualitative comparison on HumanML3D against PDP, UniPhys, and CLoSD — SCRIPT follows the prompt more faithfully while staying physically plausible.

Ablation Studies

We ablate the JAST-DiT token streams, the nonlinear history conditioning, and the hybrid reward, all on the HumanML3D test set.

Method R-Precision Motion Quality Duration ↑
Top-1 ↑Top-2 ↑Top-3 ↑ FID ↓MM-Dist ↓Diversity →
Phys-GT 0.6510.8150.882 0.0001.7001.494 100.00%
SCRIPT Stage I, full 0.4290.5950.689 0.2032.1121.462 97.67%
Stream ablation
Action stream only 0.3570.5240.630 0.4852.2681.433 97.52%
w/o Text stream 0.3070.4610.563 0.9672.3901.357 98.47%
w/o State stream 0.3840.5400.633 0.3072.2431.461 94.57%
History ablation
w/ Uniform sampling 0.4190.5830.679 0.3022.1691.446 96.29%
w/ Longer history 0.3950.5560.654 0.1662.1921.468 98.14%
w/o History 0.1170.2030.278 4.0632.9100.946 76.68%

Removing any JAST-DiT stream hurts: text carries semantic intent, state anchors physical context, action is executable control. Nonlinear history conditioning outperforms uniform sampling, an over-long window, and no history. SCRIPT (Stage I, full) is the reference; bold marks the best value per column.

Method R-Prec.
Top-3 ↑
Motion Quality Physics
FID ↓MM-Dist ↓Diversity → Floating ↓Jerk ↓Duration ↑
Phys-GT 0.882 0.0001.7001.494 17.492.941100.00%
SCRIPT Stage II, full 0.693 0.1642.1231.486 17.611.70698.08%
Hybrid-reward ablation
w/o physical reward 0.680 0.2202.1551.471 20.792.25493.62%
w/o text reward 0.649 0.4302.2191.425 15.401.16998.74%

Without the physical reward the policy keeps semantics but loses plausibility; without the text reward it takes a shortcut — better stability (Floating / Jerk / Duration) but degraded alignment and quality. The full hybrid reward avoids both extremes.

Qualitative ablations. The full model stays stable and prompt-faithful, while ablated variants fail in stability, prompt-following, or motion quality.

BibTeX

@article{zhang2026script,
  title   = {SCRIPT: Scalable Diffusion Policy with Multi-stage Training for
             Language-driven Physics-Based Humanoid Control},
  author  = {Zhang, Jingyan and Liang, Han and Zhang, Ruichi and Li, Bin and
             Zhang, Juze and Chen, Xin and Wang, Jingya and Xu, Lan and Yu, Jingyi},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.22894},
  year    = {2026}
}