# LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00341/) (2020)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10658/) (2022)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)

## 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)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [SemTalk: Holistic Co-speech Motion Generation with Frame-level Semantic Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16563/) (2024)
- [Retrieving Semantics from the Deep: an RAG Solution for Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06786/) (2024)
- [Weakly-Supervised Emotion Transition Learning for Diverse 3D Co-speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17532/) (2023)
- [SemGes: Semantics-aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation using Semantic Coherence and Relevance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19359/) (2025)
- [X-Dancer: Expressive Music to Human Dance Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17414/) (2025)
- [Beyond Talking -- Generating Holistic 3D Human Dyadic Motion for Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19467/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Error Accumulation in Co-Speech Motion Generation via Global Rotation Diffusion and Multi-Level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10076/) (2025)
- [AudCast: Audio-Driven Human Video Generation by Cascaded Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19824/) (2025)
- [Co3Gesture: Towards Coherent Concurrent Co-speech 3D Gesture Generation with Interactive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01746/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Speech-driven Personalized Gesture Synthetics: Harnessing Automatic Fuzzy Feature Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10805/) (2024)
- [MMoFusion: Multi-modal Co-Speech Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02905/) (2024)
- [PianoMotion10M: Dataset and Benchmark for Hand Motion Generation in Piano Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09326/) (2024)
- [Separate to Collaborate: Dual-Stream Diffusion Model for Coordinated Piano Hand Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09885/) (2025)
- [CoordSpeaker: Exploiting Gesture Captioning for Coordinated Caption-Empowered Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22863/) (2025)
- [SemConFlow: Semantic Grounding of Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Contrastive Flow-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26553/) (2026)
- [Bridge to Non-Barrier Communication: Gloss-Prompted Fine-grained Cued Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19277/) (2024)
- [ViMo: Generating Motions from Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06614/) (2024)
- [Towards a GENEA Leaderboard -- an Extended, Living Benchmark for Evaluating and Advancing Conversational Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06327/) (2024)
- [Understanding Co-speech Gestures in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22668/) (2025)
- [ExGes: Expressive Human Motion Retrieval and Modulation for Audio-Driven Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06499/) (2025)
- [SARAH: Spatially Aware Real-time Agentic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18432/) (2026)
- [Not All Frames Are Equal: Complexity-Aware Masked Motion Generation via Motion Spectral Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29655/) (2026)
- [MAG: Multi-Modal Aligned Autoregressive Co-Speech Gesture Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14040/) (2025)
- [Efficient Listener: Dyadic Facial Motion Synthesis via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20685/) (2025)
- [Towards Reliable Human Evaluations in Gesture Generation: Insights from a Community-Driven State-of-the-Art Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01233/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gestures are non-verbal but important behaviors accompanying people's speech. While previous methods are able to generate speech rhythm-synchronized gestures, the semantic context of the speech is generally lacking in the gesticulations. Although semantic gestures do not occur very regularly in human speech, they are indeed the key for the audience to understand the speech context in a more immersive environment. Hence, we introduce LivelySpeaker, a framework that realizes semantics-aware co-speech gesture generation and offers several control handles. In particular, our method decouples the task into two stages: script-based gesture generation and audio-guided rhythm refinement. Specifically, the script-based gesture generation leverages the pre-trained CLIP text embeddings as the guidance for generating gestures that are highly semantically aligned with the script. Then, we devise a simple but effective diffusion-based gesture generation backbone simply using pure MLPs, that is conditioned on only audio signals and learns to gesticulate with realistic motions. We utilize such powerful prior to rhyme the script-guided gestures with the audio signals, notably in a zero-shot setting. Our novel two-stage generation framework also enables several applications, such as changing the gesticulation style, editing the co-speech gestures via textual prompting, and controlling the semantic awareness and rhythm alignment with guided diffusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework over competing methods. In addition, our core diffusion-based generative model also achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks. The code and model will be released to facilitate future research.