DReCon: Data-Driven Responsive Control Of Physics-Based Characters

“[Ubisoft] propose a two-step approach for building responsive simulated character controllers from unstructured motion capture data. First, meaningful features from the data such as movement direction, heading direction, speed, and locomotion style, are interactively specified and drive a kinematic character controller implemented using motion matching. Second, reinforcement learning is used to train a simulated character controller that is general enough to track the entire distribution of motion that can be generated by the kinematic controller.”

Read the paper here, and an article on the subject here.