In this study, we explore the potential of state space models (SSMs). Direct application of SSMs in gesture synthesis encounters difficulties, which stem primarily from the diverse movement dynamics of various body parts.

Understanding how the brain responds to external stimuli and decoding this process has been a significant challenge in neuroscience. While previous studies typically concentrated on brain-to-image and brain-to-language reconstruction, our work strives to reconstruct gestures associated with speech stimuli perceived by brain. Unfortunately, the lack of paired \{brain, speech, gesture\} data hinders the deployment of deep learning models for this purpose. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, \textbf{fMRI2GES}, that allows training of fMRI-to-gesture reconstruction networks on unpaired data using \textbf{Dual Brain Decoding Alignment}. This method relies on two key components: (i) observed texts that elicit brain responses, and (ii) textual descriptions associated with the gestures. Then, instead of training models in a completely supervised manner to find a mapping relationship among the three modalities, we harness an fMRI-to-text model, a text-to-gesture model with paired data and an fMRI-to-gesture model with unpaired data, establishing dual fMRI-to-gesture reconstruction patterns. Afterward, we explicitly align two outputs and train our model in a self-supervision way. We show that our proposed method can reconstruct expressive gestures directly from fMRI recordings. We also investigate fMRI signals from different ROIs in the cortex and how they affect generation results. Overall, we provide new insights into decoding co-speech gestures, thereby advancing our understanding of neuroscience and cognitive science.

Early approaches used au-toregressive sequence modeling to map speech or text to motion sequences [19, 9], while diffusion-based generators now dominate for their ability to produce detailed, temporally consistent, and natural gestures [12, 10]. Other works explore discrete motion representations, enabling more controllable synthesis [8]. These models accept either speech or text as input and typically rely on speaker embeddings for multi-speaker modeling, which limits their generalization ability to speakers unseen during training. In contrast, Gelina generates both speech and gestures directly from text, and can also clone voice and gestural style through sequence continuation using a speech-gesture prompt, without relying on speaker embeddings. T ext-to-speech approaches: Lately, TTS has shifted toward data-driven methods, with notable advances in discrete code modeling [4, 5, 6].

The accompanying actions and gestures in dialogue are often closely linked to interactions with the environment, such as looking toward the interlocutor or using gestures to point to the described target at appropriate moments. Speech and semantics guide the production of gestures by determining their timing (WHEN) and style (HOW), while the spatial locations of interactive objects dictate their directional execution (WHERE). Existing approaches either rely solely on descriptive language to generate motions or utilize audio to produce non-interactive gestures, thereby lacking the characterization of interactive timing and spatial intent. This significantly limits the applicability of conversational gesture generation, whether in robotics or in the fields of game and animation production. To address this gap, we present a full-stack solution. We first established a unique data collection method to simultaneously capture high-precision human motion and spatial intent. We then developed a generation model driven by audio, language, and spatial data, alongside dedicated metrics for evaluating interaction timing and spatial accuracy. Finally, we deployed the solution on a humanoid robot, enabling rich, context-aware physical interactions.

Whole-body audio-driven avatar pose and expression generation is a critical task for creating lifelike digital humans and enhancing the capabilities of interactive virtual agents, with wide-ranging applications in virtual reality, digital entertainment, and remote communication. Existing approaches often generate audio-driven facial expressions and gestures independently, which introduces a significant limitation: the lack of seamless coordination between facial and gestural elements, resulting in less natural and cohesive animations. To address this limitation, we propose AsynFusion, a novel framework that leverages diffusion transformers to achieve harmonious expression and gesture synthesis. The proposed method is built upon a dual-branch DiT architecture, which enables the parallel generation of facial expressions and gestures. Within the model, we introduce a Cooperative Synchronization Module to facilitate bidirectional feature interaction between the two modalities, and an Asynchronous LCM Sampling strategy to reduce computational overhead while maintaining high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AsynFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating real-time, synchronized whole-body animations, consistently outperforming existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

In this study, we explore the potential of state space models (SSMs). Direct application of SSMs in gesture synthesis encounters difficulties, which stem primarily from the diverse movement dynamics of various body parts.

When humans speak, gestures help convey communicative intentions, such as adding emphasis or describing concepts. However, current co-speech gesture generation methods rely solely on superficial linguistic cues (e.g. speech audio or text transcripts), neglecting to understand and leverage the communicative intention that underpins human gestures. This results in outputs that are rhythmically synchronized with speech but are semantically shallow. To address this gap, we introduce Intentional-Gesture, a novel framework that casts gesture generation as an intention-reasoning task grounded in high-level communicative functions. First, we curate the InG dataset by augmenting BEAT-2 with gesture-intention annotations (i.e., text sentences summarizing intentions), which are automatically annotated using large vision-language models. Next, we introduce the Intentional Gesture Motion Tokenizer to leverage these intention annotations. It injects high-level communicative functions (e.g., intentions) into tokenized motion representations to enable intention-aware gesture synthesis that are both temporally aligned and semantically meaningful, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on the BEAT-2 benchmark. Our framework offers a modular foundation for expressive gesture generation in digital humans and embodied AI. Project Page: https://andypinxinliu.github.io/Intentional-Gesture

One of the main goals of robotics and intelligent agent research is to enable natural communication with humans in physically situated settings. While recent work has focused on verbal modes such as language and speech, non-verbal communication is crucial for flexible interaction. We present a framework for generating pointing gestures in embodied agents by combining imitation and reinforcement learning. Using a small motion capture dataset, our method learns a motor control policy that produces physically valid, naturalistic gestures with high referential accuracy. We evaluate the approach against supervised learning and retrieval baselines in both objective metrics and a virtual reality referential game with human users. Results show that our system achieves higher naturalness and accuracy than state-of-the-art supervised models, highlighting the promise of imitation-RL for communicative gesture generation and its potential application to robots.

Human motion generation has advanced rapidly in recent years, yet the critical problem of creating spatially grounded, context-aware gestures has been largely overlooked. Existing models typically specialize either in descriptive motion generation, such as locomotion and object interaction, or in isolated co-speech gesture synthesis aligned with utterance semantics. However, both lines of work often treat motion and environmental grounding separately, limiting advances toward embodied, communicative agents. T o address this gap, our work introduces a multi-modal dataset and framework for grounded gesture generation, combining two key resources: (1) a synthetic dataset of spatially grounded referential gestures, and (2) MM-Conv, a VR-based dataset capturing two-party dialogues. T ogether, they provide over 7.7 hours of synchronized motion, speech, and 3D scene information, standardized in the HumanML3D format. Our framework further connects to a physics-based simulator, enabling synthetic data generation and situated evaluation. By bridging gesture modeling and spatial grounding, our contribution establishes a foundation for advancing research in situated gesture generation and grounded multimodal interaction.

Generating full-body human gestures encompassing face, body, hands, and global movements from audio is a valuable yet challenging task in virtual avatar creation. Previous systems focused on tok-enizing the human gestures framewisely and predicting the tokens of each frame from the input audio. However, one observation is that the number of frames required for a complete expressive human gesture, defined as granularity, varies among different human gesture patterns. Existing systems fail to model these gesture patterns due to the fixed granularity of their gesture tokens. To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework named Multi-Granular Gesture Generator (M3G) for audio-driven holistic gesture generation. In M3G, we propose a novel Multi-Granular VQ-V AE (MGVQ-V AE) to tokenize motion patterns and reconstruct motion sequences from different temporal granularities. Subsequently, we proposed a multi-granular token predictor that extracts multi-granular information from audio and predicts the corresponding motion tokens. Then M3G reconstructs the human gestures from the predicted tokens using the MGVQ-V AE. Both objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our proposed M3G framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of generating natural and expressive full-body human gestures.