FEIN-Z: Autoregressive Behavior Cloning for Speech-Driven Gesture Generation

Abstract

Human communication relies on multiple modalities such as verbal expressions, facial cues, and bodily gestures. Developing computational approaches to process and generate these multimodal signals is critical for seamless human-agent interaction. A particular challenge is the generation of co-speech gestures due to the large variability and number of gestures that can accompany a verbal utterance, leading to a one-to-many mapping problem. This paper presents an approach based on a Feature Extraction Infusion Network (FEIN-Z) that adopts insights from robot imitation learning and applies them to co-speech gesture generation. Building on the BC-Z architecture, our framework combines transformer architectures and Wasserstein generative adversarial networks. We describe the FEIN-Z methodology and evaluation results obtained within the GENEA Challenge 2023, demonstrating good results and significant improvements in human-likeness over the GENEA baseline. We discuss potential areas for improvement, such as refining input segmentation, employing more fine-grained control networks, and exploring alternative inference methods.