# Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 180 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01615/) (2018)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [Towards Metrical Reconstruction of Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06607/) (2022)
- [Monocular Expressive Body Regression through Body-Driven Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09062/) (2020)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05301/) (2021)
- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [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 180)

- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [ECON: Explicit Clothed humans Optimized via Normal integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07422/) (2022)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [TADA! Text to Animatable Digital Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10899/) (2023)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10894/) (2023)
- [TRACE: 5D Temporal Regression of Avatars with Dynamic Cameras in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02850/) (2023)
- [DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04919/) (2023)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [Move as You Say, Interact as You Can: Language-guided Human Motion Generation with Scene Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18036/) (2024)
- [FaceDiffuser: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11306/) (2023)
- [CoMo: Controllable Motion Generation through Language Guided Pose Code Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13900/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Human4DiT: 360-degree Human Video Generation with 4D Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17405/) (2024)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08764/) (2024)
- [MambaTalk: Efficient Holistic Gesture Synthesis with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09471/) (2024)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)
- [NIKI: Neural Inverse Kinematics with Invertible Neural Networks for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08590/) (2023)
- [GestureLSM: Latent Shortcut based Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Spatial-Temporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18898/) (2025)
- [Digital Life Project: Autonomous 3D Characters with Social Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04547/) (2023)
- [ConvoFusion: Multi-Modal Conversational Diffusion for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17936/) (2024)
- [EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/) (2023)
- [Emotional Speech-driven 3D Body Animation via Disentangled Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04466/) (2023)
- [Media2Face: Co-speech Facial Animation Generation With Multi-Modality Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15687/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work addresses the problem of generating 3D holistic body motions from human speech. Given a speech recording, we synthesize sequences of 3D body poses, hand gestures, and facial expressions that are realistic and diverse. To achieve this, we first build a high-quality dataset of 3D holistic body meshes with synchronous speech. We then define a novel speech-to-motion generation framework in which the face, body, and hands are modeled separately. The separated modeling stems from the fact that face articulation strongly correlates with human speech, while body poses and hand gestures are less correlated. Specifically, we employ an autoencoder for face motions, and a compositional vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) for the body and hand motions. The compositional VQ-VAE is key to generating diverse results. Additionally, we propose a cross-conditional autoregressive model that generates body poses and hand gestures, leading to coherent and realistic motions. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our novel dataset and code will be released for research purposes at https://talkshow.is.tue.mpg.de.