# MAG: Multi-Modal Aligned Autoregressive Co-Speech Gesture Generation without Vector Quantization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14040/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2025.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11838/) (2024)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02379/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Fluid: Scaling Autoregressive Text-to-image Generative Models with Continuous Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13863/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13161/) (2022)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [Learning Speech-driven 3D Conversational Gestures from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06837/) (2021)
- [DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04919/) (2023)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [DiffSHEG: A Diffusion-Based Approach for Real-Time Speech-driven Holistic 3D Expression and Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04747/) (2024)
- [Speech2AffectiveGestures: Synthesizing Co-Speech Gestures with Generative Adversarial Affective Expression Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00262/) (2021)
- [MambaTalk: Efficient Holistic Gesture Synthesis with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09471/) (2024)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EchoAvatar: Real-time Generative Avatar Animation from Audio Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28272/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work focuses on full-body co-speech gesture generation. Existing methods typically employ an autoregressive model accompanied by vector-quantized tokens for gesture generation, which results in information loss and compromises the realism of the generated gestures. To address this, inspired by the natural continuity of real-world human motion, we propose MAG, a novel multi-modal aligned framework for high-quality and diverse co-speech gesture synthesis without relying on discrete tokenization. Specifically, (1) we introduce a motion-text-audio-aligned variational autoencoder (MTA-VAE), which leverages pre-trained WavCaps' text and audio embeddings to enhance both semantic and rhythmic alignment with motion, ultimately producing more realistic gestures. (2) Building on this, we propose a multimodal masked autoregressive model (MMAG) that enables autoregressive modeling in continuous motion embeddings through diffusion without vector quantization. To further ensure multi-modal consistency, MMAG incorporates a hybrid granularity audio-text fusion block, which serves as conditioning for diffusion process. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAG achieves stateof-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively, producing highly realistic and diverse co-speech gestures.The code will be released to facilitate future research.