# Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13161 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13161/

## Key facts

- Cited by 107 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09561/) (2017)
- [Monocular Expressive Body Regression through Body-Driven Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09062/) (2020)
- [The Sound of Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05979/) (2019)
- [Unified Multisensory Perception: Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10558/) (2020)
- [In defence of metric learning for speaker recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11982/) (2020)
- [Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07786/) (2022)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Model for Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00655/) (2018)
- [Human Motion Prediction via Spatio-Temporal Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05478/) (2018)
- [Music Gesture for Visual Sound Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09476/) (2020)
- [Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12541/) (2018)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 107)

- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [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)
- [HumanGaussian: Text-Driven 3D Human Generation with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17061/) (2023)
- [DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04919/) (2023)
- [HyperHuman: Hyper-Realistic Human Generation with Latent Structural Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08579/) (2023)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [DiffSHEG: A Diffusion-Based Approach for Real-Time Speech-driven Holistic 3D Expression and Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04747/) (2024)
- [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)
- [GestureLSM: Latent Shortcut based Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Spatial-Temporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18898/) (2025)
- [ConvoFusion: Multi-Modal Conversational Diffusion for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17936/) (2024)
- [QPGesture: Quantization-Based and Phase-Guided Motion Matching for Natural Speech-Driven Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11094/) (2023)
- [EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/) (2023)
- [LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09294/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SemTalk: Holistic Co-speech Motion Generation with Frame-level Semantic Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16563/) (2024)
- [Learning to Dub Movies via Hierarchical Prosody Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04054/) (2022)
- [Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08737/) (2023)
- [Towards Variable and Coordinated Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00368/) (2024)
- [MotionCraft: Crafting Whole-Body Motion with Plug-and-Play Multimodal Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21136/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Human Video Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08428/) (2024)
- [Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03883/) (2025)
- [Static and Dynamic Concepts for Self-supervised Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12795/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating speech-consistent body and gesture movements is a long-standing problem in virtual avatar creation. Previous studies often synthesize pose movement in a holistic manner, where poses of all joints are generated simultaneously. Such a straightforward pipeline fails to generate fine-grained co-speech gestures. One observation is that the hierarchical semantics in speech and the hierarchical structures of human gestures can be naturally described into multiple granularities and associated together. To fully utilize the rich connections between speech audio and human gestures, we propose a novel framework named Hierarchical Audio-to-Gesture (HA2G) for co-speech gesture generation. In HA2G, a Hierarchical Audio Learner extracts audio representations across semantic granularities. A Hierarchical Pose Inferer subsequently renders the entire human pose gradually in a hierarchical manner. To enhance the quality of synthesized gestures, we develop a contrastive learning strategy based on audio-text alignment for better audio representations. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method renders realistic co-speech gestures and outperforms previous methods in a clear margin. Project page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/HA2G