# Fake it to make it: Using synthetic data to remedy the data shortage in joint multimodal speech-and-gesture synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19622/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 83 of its 120 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14701/) (2020)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [FM2DS: Few-Shot Multimodal Multihop Data Synthesis with Knowledge Distillation for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07030/) (2024)
- [Towards Privacy-aware Mental Health AI Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00451/) (2025)
- [Gelina: Unified Speech and Gesture Synthesis via Interleaved Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12834/) (2025)
- [Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04250/) (2026)
- [DualTrack: Synchronized speech-gesture generation via symmetric coupling of pretrained priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although humans engaged in face-to-face conversation simultaneously communicate both verbally and non-verbally, methods for joint and unified synthesis of speech audio and co-speech 3D gesture motion from text are a new and emerging field. These technologies hold great promise for more human-like, efficient, expressive, and robust synthetic communication, but are currently held back by the lack of suitably large datasets, as existing methods are trained on parallel data from all constituent modalities. Inspired by student-teacher methods, we propose a straightforward solution to the data shortage, by simply synthesising additional training material. Specifically, we use unimodal synthesis models trained on large datasets to create multimodal (but synthetic) parallel training data, and then pre-train a joint synthesis model on that material. In addition, we propose a new synthesis architecture that adds better and more controllable prosody modelling to the state-of-the-art method in the field. Our results confirm that pre-training on large amounts of synthetic data improves the quality of both the speech and the motion synthesised by the multimodal model, with the proposed architecture yielding further benefits when pre-trained on the synthetic data. See https://shivammehta25.github.io/MAGI/ for example output.