# SpeechAct: Towards Generating Whole-body Motion from Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17425 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17425/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Generating 3D faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10267/) (2018)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01615/) (2018)
- [Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12577/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04160/) (2019)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00541/) (2022)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [We are More than Our Joints: Predicting how 3D Bodies Move](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00619/) (2020)
- [Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12541/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01957/) (2025)
- [SemTalk: Holistic Co-speech Motion Generation with Frame-level Semantic Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16563/) (2024)
- [FMReward: Aligning and Evaluating Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15296/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Body and Face Motion: Datasets, Performance Evaluation Metrics and Generative Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09005/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the problem of generating whole-body motion from speech. Despite great successes, prior methods still struggle to produce reasonable and diverse whole-body motions from speech. This is due to their reliance on suboptimal representations and a lack of strategies for generating diverse results. To address these challenges, we present a novel hybrid point representation to achieve accurate and continuous motion generation, e.g., avoiding foot skating, and this representation can be transformed into an easy-to-use representation, i.e., SMPL-X body mesh, for many applications. To generate whole-body motion from speech, for facial motion, closely tied to the audio signal, we introduce an encoder-decoder architecture to achieve deterministic outcomes. However, for the body and hands, which have weaker connections to the audio signal, we aim to generate diverse yet reasonable motions. To boost diversity in motion generation, we propose a contrastive motion learning method to encourage the model to produce more distinctive representations. Specifically, we design a robust VQ-VAE to learn a quantized motion codebook using our hybrid representation. Then, we regress the motion representation from the audio signal by a translation model employing our contrastive motion learning method. Experimental results validate the superior performance and the correctness of our model. The project page is available for research purposes at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/SpeechAct.