ACE: Adversarial Correspondence Embedding for Cross Morphology Motion Retargeting from Human to Nonhuman Characters
easypapersniper.github.io/projects/ACE...

Animating non-humanoid characters with human motion data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_HAVnDCfkw

Semantic Deformation Transfer
https://people.csail.mit.edu/drdaniel/research/baran-2009-sdt.pdf

Learning to Correspond Dynamical Systems
https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.03015

Creature Features: Online motion puppetry for non-human characters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AVvHXInVoA

C-3PO: Cyclic-Three-Phase Optimization for Human-Robot Motion Retargeting based on Reinforcement Learning
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11303

Kinematic Motion Retargeting via Neural Latent Optimization for Learning Sign Language
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08882

Skeleton-Aware Networks for Deep Motion Retargeting
https://deepmotionediting.github.io/retargeting

Human Motion Control of Quadrupedal Robots using Deep Reinforcement Learning
https://sites.google.com/view/humanconquad

who wants to work on this

big challenge will be training generative models to produce 3D models, rigs, etc. for these avatars, as well as motion retargeting from humanoid inputs (like full-body tracking) to non-humanoid skeletons