# Cosh-DiT: Co-Speech Gesture Video Synthesis via Hybrid Audio-Visual Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 73 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [MoSA: Motion-Coherent Human Video Generation via Structure-Appearance Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17404/) (2025)
- [SparseCtrl-HOI: Sparse Temporal Control for Human-Object Interaction Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05994/) (2026)
- [LLM-Based Selection of Incongruent Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior for Virtual Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22731/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Co-speech gesture video synthesis is a challenging task that requires both probabilistic modeling of human gestures and the synthesis of realistic images that align with the rhythmic nuances of speech. To address these challenges, we propose Cosh-DiT, a Co-speech gesture video system with hybrid Diffusion Transformers that perform audio-to-motion and motion-to-video synthesis using discrete and continuous diffusion modeling, respectively. First, we introduce an audio Diffusion Transformer (Cosh-DiT-A) to synthesize expressive gesture dynamics synchronized with speech rhythms. To capture upper body, facial, and hand movement priors, we employ vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) to jointly learn their dependencies within a discrete latent space. Then, for realistic video synthesis conditioned on the generated speech-driven motion, we design a visual Diffusion Transformer (Cosh-DiT-V) that effectively integrates spatial and temporal contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently generates lifelike videos with expressive facial expressions and natural, smooth gestures that align seamlessly with speech.