# Speech Drives Templates: Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis with Learned Templates

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.08020 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08020/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04160/) (2019)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [Realistic Speech-Driven Facial Animation with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06337/) (2019)
- [Talking-head Generation with Rhythmic Head Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08547/) (2020)
- [Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12541/) (2018)
- [Neural Head Reenactment with Latent Pose Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12000/) (2020)
- [You said that?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02966/) (2017)
- [Synthesizing Images of Humans in Unseen Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07739/) (2018)
- [Style Transfer for Co-Speech Gesture Animation: A Multi-Speaker Conditional-Mixture Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12553/) (2020)
- [Analyzing Input and Output Representations for Speech-Driven Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03369/) (2019)
- [Audio to Body Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09382/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13161/) (2022)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10894/) (2023)
- [StyleTalk: One-shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01081/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05339/) (2023)
- [Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02350/) (2022)
- [MambaTalk: Efficient Holistic Gesture Synthesis with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09471/) (2024)
- [QPGesture: Quantization-Based and Phase-Guided Motion Matching for Natural Speech-Driven Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11094/) (2023)
- [LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09294/) (2023)
- [CyberHost: Taming Audio-driven Avatar Diffusion Model with Region Codebook Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01876/) (2024)
- [Rhythmic Gesticulator: Rhythm-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis with Hierarchical Neural Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01448/) (2022)
- [Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation via Motion-Decoupled Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01862/) (2024)
- [TANGO: Co-Speech Gesture Video Reenactment with Hierarchical Audio Motion Embedding and Diffusion Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04221/) (2024)
- [Make-Your-Anchor: A Diffusion-based 2D Avatar Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16510/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Human Video Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08428/) (2024)
- [Memories are One-to-Many Mapping Alleviators in Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05005/) (2022)
- [BodyFormer: Semantics-guided 3D Body Gesture Synthesis with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06851/) (2023)
- [DiffTED: One-shot Audio-driven TED Talk Video Generation with Diffusion-based Co-speech Gestures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07649/) (2024)
- [Chain of Generation: Multi-Modal Gesture Synthesis via Cascaded Conditional Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15900/) (2023)
- [UnifiedGesture: A Unified Gesture Synthesis Model for Multiple Skeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07051/) (2023)
- [X-Dancer: Expressive Music to Human Dance Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17414/) (2025)
- [Audio-Sync Video Generation with Multi-Stream Temporal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08003/) (2025)
- [Beyond Talking -- Generating Holistic 3D Human Dyadic Motion for Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19467/) (2024)
- [The Effects of Embodiment and Personality Expression on Learning in LLM-based Educational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10993/) (2024)
- [MOSPA: Human Motion Generation Driven by Spatial Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11949/) (2025)
- [Freeform Body Motion Generation from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02291/) (2022)
- [Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis using Discrete Gesture Token Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12822/) (2023)
- [PersonaGesture: Single-Reference Co-Speech Gesture Personalization for Unseen Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06064/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Co-speech gesture generation is to synthesize a gesture sequence that not only looks real but also matches with the input speech audio. Our method generates the movements of a complete upper body, including arms, hands, and the head. Although recent data-driven methods achieve great success, challenges still exist, such as limited variety, poor fidelity, and lack of objective metrics. Motivated by the fact that the speech cannot fully determine the gesture, we design a method that learns a set of gesture template vectors to model the latent conditions, which relieve the ambiguity. For our method, the template vector determines the general appearance of a generated gesture sequence, while the speech audio drives subtle movements of the body, both indispensable for synthesizing a realistic gesture sequence. Due to the intractability of an objective metric for gesture-speech synchronization, we adopt the lip-sync error as a proxy metric to tune and evaluate the synchronization ability of our model. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method in both objective and subjective evaluations on fidelity and synchronization.