# EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Towards Understanding Ensemble, Knowledge Distillation and Self-Distillation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09816/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00534/) (2021)
- [Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04160/) (2019)
- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05297/) (2022)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [Monocular Expressive Body Regression through Body-Driven Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09062/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Class-Balanced Methods for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition from a Domain Adaptation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10780/) (2020)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [In defence of metric learning for speaker recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11982/) (2020)
- [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)
- [AvatarPoser: Articulated Full-Body Pose Tracking from Sparse Motion Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13784/) (2022)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)
- [Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13161/) (2022)
- [Towards Accurate Markerless Human Shape and Pose Estimation over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07548/) (2017)
- [PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17472/) (2023)
- [DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04919/) (2023)
- [Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02350/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [MambaTalk: Efficient Holistic Gesture Synthesis with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09471/) (2024)
- [Emotional Speech-driven 3D Body Animation via Disentangled Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04466/) (2023)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation by Exploring Cross-Modal Mutual Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16620/) (2023)
- [BAVS: Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Integrating Foundation Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10175/) (2023)
- [Towards Variable and Coordinated Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00368/) (2024)
- [Chain of Generation: Multi-Modal Gesture Synthesis via Cascaded Conditional Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15900/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Emotion Transition Learning for Diverse 3D Co-speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17532/) (2023)
- [The DiffuseStyleGesture+ entry to the GENEA Challenge 2023](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13879/) (2023)
- [A Unified Framework for Multimodal, Multi-Part Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16471/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Error Accumulation in Co-Speech Motion Generation via Global Rotation Diffusion and Multi-Level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10076/) (2025)
- [Co3Gesture: Towards Coherent Concurrent Co-speech 3D Gesture Generation with Interactive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01746/) (2025)
- [Social Agent: Mastering Dyadic Nonverbal Behavior Generation via Conversational LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04637/) (2025)
- [BOTH2Hands: Inferring 3D Hands from Both Text Prompts and Body Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07937/) (2023)
- [Affective Behaviour Analysis via Progressive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16945/) (2024)
- [DyaDiT: A Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer for Socially Favorable Dyadic Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23165/) (2026)
- [PersonaGesture: Single-Reference Co-Speech Gesture Personalization for Unseen Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06064/) (2026)
- [Combo: Co-speech holistic 3D human motion generation and efficient customizable adaptation in harmony](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09397/) (2024)
- [DanceEditor: Towards Iterative Editable Music-driven Dance Generation with Open-Vocabulary Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17342/) (2025)
- [TalkCuts: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-Shot Human Speech Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07249/) (2025)
- [Text-Driven 3D Hand Motion Generation from Sign Language Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15902/) (2025)
- [CoordSpeaker: Exploiting Gesture Captioning for Coordinated Caption-Empowered Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22863/) (2025)
- [Cosh-DiT: Co-Speech Gesture Video Synthesis via Hybrid Audio-Visual Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09942/) (2025)
- [PhysDrift: Bridging the Embodiment Gap in Humanoid Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19935/) (2026)
- [C2G2: Controllable Co-speech Gesture Generation with Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15016/) (2023)
- [CoCoGesture: Toward Coherent Co-speech 3D Gesture Generation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16874/) (2024)
- [VividListener: Expressive and Controllable Listener Dynamics Modeling for Multi-Modal Responsive Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21718/) (2025)
- [Biomechanics-Guided Residual Approach to Generalizable Human Motion Generation and Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06151/) (2025)
- [3DGesPolicy: Phoneme-Aware Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation Based on Action Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18451/) (2026)
- [Learning Context-Adaptive Motion Priors for Masked Motion Diffusion Models with Efficient Kinematic Attention Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07697/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating vivid and diverse 3D co-speech gestures is crucial for various applications in animating virtual avatars. While most existing methods can generate gestures from audio directly, they usually overlook that emotion is one of the key factors of authentic co-speech gesture generation. In this work, we propose EmotionGesture, a novel framework for synthesizing vivid and diverse emotional co-speech 3D gestures from audio. Considering emotion is often entangled with the rhythmic beat in speech audio, we first develop an Emotion-Beat Mining module (EBM) to extract the emotion and audio beat features as well as model their correlation via a transcript-based visual-rhythm alignment. Then, we propose an initial pose based Spatial-Temporal Prompter (STP) to generate future gestures from the given initial poses. STP effectively models the spatial-temporal correlations between the initial poses and the future gestures, thus producing the spatial-temporal coherent pose prompt. Once we obtain pose prompts, emotion, and audio beat features, we will generate 3D co-speech gestures through a transformer architecture. However, considering the poses of existing datasets often contain jittering effects, this would lead to generating unstable gestures. To address this issue, we propose an effective objective function, dubbed Motion-Smooth Loss. Specifically, we model motion offset to compensate for jittering ground-truth by forcing gestures to be smooth. Last, we present an emotion-conditioned VAE to sample emotion features, enabling us to generate diverse emotional results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving vivid and diverse emotional co-speech 3D gestures. Our code and dataset will be released at the project page: https://xingqunqi-lab.github.io/Emotion-Gesture-Web/