# MIBURI: Towards Expressive Interactive Gesture Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03282/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12541/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Gesticulator: A framework for semantically-aware speech-driven gesture generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09326/) (2020)
- [ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07556/) (2022)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [Analyzing Input and Output Representations for Speech-Driven Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03369/) (2019)
- [MambaTalk: Efficient Holistic Gesture Synthesis with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09471/) (2024)
- [GestureLSM: Latent Shortcut based Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Spatial-Temporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18898/) (2025)
- [Digital Life Project: Autonomous 3D Characters with Social Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04547/) (2023)
- [ConvoFusion: Multi-Modal Conversational Diffusion for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17936/) (2024)
- [Semantic Gesticulator: Semantics-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09814/) (2024)
- [Retrieving Semantics from the Deep: an RAG Solution for Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06786/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [SentiAvatar: Towards Expressive and Interactive Digital Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02908/) (2026)
- [DyaPlex: Full-Duplex Speech-Motion Model for Dyadic Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03874/) (2026)
- [UMo: Unified Sparse Motion Modeling for Real-Time Co-Speech Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14731/) (2026)
- [Puppeteer: Object-Grounded Posture-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00369/) (2026)
- [GestureFAR: Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Flow Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21576/) (2026)
- [InteractGesture: Progressive Chunk Guidance for Continuous Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25734/) (2026)
- [Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04250/) (2026)
- [SocialHumanoid: Towards Expressive Humanoid Behavior via One-Step Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33311/) (2026)
- [When Semantics Matter: Reliability-Aware Semantic-Rhythm Control for Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36685/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) aim to emulate human face-to-face interaction through speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Current large language model (LLM)-based conversational agents lack embodiment and the expressive gestures essential for natural interaction. Existing solutions for ECAs often produce rigid, low-diversity motions, that are unsuitable for human-like interaction. Alternatively, generative methods for co-speech gesture synthesis yield natural body gestures but depend on future speech context and require long run-times. To bridge this gap, we present MIBURI, the first online, causal framework for generating expressive full-body gestures and facial expressions synchronized with real-time spoken dialogue. We employ body-part aware gesture codecs that encode hierarchical motion details into multi-level discrete tokens. These tokens are then autoregressively generated by a two-dimensional causal framework conditioned on LLM-based speech-text embeddings, modeling both temporal dynamics and part-level motion hierarchy in real time. Further, we introduce auxiliary objectives to encourage expressive and diverse gestures while preventing convergence to static poses. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that our causal and real-time approach produces natural and contextually aligned gestures against recent baselines. We urge the reader to explore demo videos on https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/MIBURI/.