# DuoGesture: Motion-Grounded Semantic Conditioning and Biomechanical Beat Priors for Co-Speech Gesture Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26236 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26236/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02119/) (2020)
- [TMR: Text-to-Motion Retrieval Using Contrastive 3D Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00976/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [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)
- [LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09294/) (2023)
- [Semantic Gesticulator: Semantics-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09814/) (2024)
- [Emotional Speech-driven 3D Body Animation via Disentangled Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04466/) (2023)
- [SemTalk: Holistic Co-speech Motion Generation with Frame-level Semantic Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16563/) (2024)
- [Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08737/) (2023)
- [Towards Variable and Coordinated Holistic Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00368/) (2024)
- [Retrieving Semantics from the Deep: an RAG Solution for Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06786/) (2024)
- [SemGes: Semantics-aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation using Semantic Coherence and Relevance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19359/) (2025)
- [SemConFlow: Semantic Grounding of Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Contrastive Flow-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26553/) (2026)

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

- [Perceptually Grounded and Semantics-Aware Evaluation for Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Co-speech gesture generation requires both semantic expressivity and biomechanically plausible rhythmic motion. Existing holistic gesture models mix lexically grounded semantic gestures with frequent prosody-aligned beat gestures. This limits semantic grounding, speech-motion alignment, and kinematic smoothness. We propose DuoGesture, a neuro-inspired and biomechanically informed approach that decomposes co-speech gesture synthesis into semantic and beat streams. The two streams are coordinated by a Semantic Variational Information Bottleneck, a stochastic frame-level gate that learns when semantic gestures should override rhythmic beat motion. The semantic stream is controlled by Motion-Grounded Semantic Conditioning, which replaces purely linguistic word embeddings with motion-language representations to provide motion-aligned semantic priors for long-tailed lexical triggers of gestures. The beat stream is further regularised by an Inertial Beat Prior, an anthropometry-weighted arm-chain module that reduces jitter and improves rhythmic consistency without constraining semantic frames. Objective evaluations and subjective experiments show that DuoGesture outperforms strong baselines, while component ablations confirm the complementary roles of semantic grounding, stochastic stream selection, and biomechanical regularisation.