# SiGnature: Explicit Motion Diffusion for Stylized Semantic Gesture

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15889/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09119/) (2023)
- [Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12541/) (2018)
- [Audio2Gestures: Generating Diverse Gestures from Speech Audio with Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06720/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08990/) (2023)
- [DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04919/) (2023)
- [ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07556/) (2022)
- [DiffSHEG: A Diffusion-Based Approach for Real-Time Speech-driven Holistic 3D Expression and Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04747/) (2024)
- [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)
- [GestureLSM: Latent Shortcut based Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Spatial-Temporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18898/) (2025)
- [EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Enabling Synergistic Full-Body Control in Prompt-Based Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00464/) (2024)
- [SemTalk: Holistic Co-speech Motion Generation with Frame-level Semantic Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16563/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have achieved impressive rhythmic synchronization, synthesizing gestures that are both semantically meaningful and faithful to a speaker's unique non-verbal style remains an open challenge. Semantic gestures, such as iconic shapes or deictic pointing, are statistically sparse, making them difficult to learn effectively within standard generative models. We present SiGnature, a framework for Stylized and Semantic Gesture generation that reconciles precise semantic control with high-fidelity style preservation. Unlike prevalent methods that rely on entangled latent representations, SiGnature operates in an explicit joint-rotation space. This design enables our core contribution, Joint Motion Integration (JMI), a training-free inference mechanism capable of injecting any external motion sequence, particularly in-the-wild semantic gestures, directly into the diffusion process. JMI automatically identifies the specific ``active joints'' conveying a semantic action and injects them into the generation, while relying on the diffusion backbone to synthesize the remaining body dynamics, including posture and flow, in accordance with the pre-learned style of the target speaker. This allows for the plug-and-play integration of arbitrary motions, including complex semantic gestures, without retraining or introducing the ``Frankenstein'' artifacts typical of cut-and-paste methods. Extensive experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that SiGnature offers superior semantic motion control while maintaining smooth and natural co-speech gesture generation and preserving the distinct characteristics of the speaker, thereby outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.