Human Motion Generation: A Survey

Human motion generation aims to generate natural human pose sequences and shows immense potential for real-world applications. Substantial progress has been made recently in motion data collection technologies and generation methods, laying the foundation for increasing interest in human motion generation. Most research within this field focuses on generating human motions based on conditional signals, such as text, audio, and scene contexts. While significant advancements have been made in recent years, the task continues to pose challenges due to the intricate nature of human motion and its implicit relationship with conditional signals. In this survey, we present a comprehensive literature review of human motion generation, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in this field. We begin by introducing the background of human motion and generative models, followed by an examination of representative methods for three mainstream sub-tasks: text-conditioned, audio-conditioned, and scene-conditioned human motion generation. Additionally, we provide an overview of common datasets and evaluation metrics. Lastly, we discuss open problems and outline potential future research directions. We hope that this survey could provide the community with a comprehensive glimpse of this rapidly evolving field and inspire novel ideas that address the outstanding challenges.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Gestures that accompany speech are an essential part of natural and efficient embodied human communication. The automatic generation of such co-speech gestures is a long-standing problem in computer animation and is considered an enabling technology in film, games, virtual social spaces, and for interaction with social robots. The problem is made challenging by the idiosyncratic and non-periodic nature of human co-speech gesture motion, and by the great diversity of communicative functions that gestures encompass. Gesture generation has seen surging interest recently, owing to the emergence of more and larger datasets of human gesture motion, combined with strides in deep-learning-based generative models, that benefit from the growing availability of data. This review article summarizes co-speech gesture generation research, with a particular focus on deep generative models. First, we articulate the theory describing human gesticulation and how it complements speech. Next, we briefly discuss rule-based and classical statistical gesture synthesis, before delving into deep learning approaches. We employ the choice of input modalities as an organizing principle, examining systems that generate gestures from audio, text, and non-linguistic input. We also chronicle the evolution of the related training data sets in terms of size, diversity, motion quality, and collection method. Finally, we identify key research challenges in gesture generation, including data availability and quality; producing human-like motion; grounding the gesture in the co-occurring speech in interaction with other speakers, and in the environment; performing gesture evaluation; and integration of gesture synthesis into applications. We highlight recent approaches to tackling the various key challenges, as well as the limitations of these approaches, and point toward areas of future development.Comment: Accepted for EUROGRAPHICS 202

AI-generated Content for Various Data Modalities: A Survey

AI-generated content (AIGC) methods aim to produce text, images, videos, 3D assets, and other media using AI algorithms. Due to its wide range of applications and the demonstrated potential of recent works, AIGC developments have been attracting lots of attention recently, and AIGC methods have been developed for various data modalities, such as image, video, text, 3D shape (as voxels, point clouds, meshes, and neural implicit fields), 3D scene, 3D human avatar (body and head), 3D motion, and audio -- each presenting different characteristics and challenges. Furthermore, there have also been many significant developments in cross-modality AIGC methods, where generative methods can receive conditioning input in one modality and produce outputs in another. Examples include going from various modalities to image, video, 3D shape, 3D scene, 3D avatar (body and head), 3D motion (skeleton and avatar), and audio modalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of AIGC methods across different data modalities, including both single-modality and cross-modality methods, highlighting the various challenges, representative works, and recent technical directions in each setting. We also survey the representative datasets throughout the modalities, and present comparative results for various modalities. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and potential future research directions

Audio is all in one: speech-driven gesture synthetics using WavLM pre-trained model

The generation of co-speech gestures for digital humans is an emerging area in the field of virtual human creation. Prior research has made progress by using acoustic and semantic information as input and adopting classify method to identify the person's ID and emotion for driving co-speech gesture generation. However, this endeavour still faces significant challenges. These challenges go beyond the intricate interplay between co-speech gestures, speech acoustic, and semantics; they also encompass the complexities associated with personality, emotion, and other obscure but important factors. This paper introduces "diffmotion-v2," a speech-conditional diffusion-based and non-autoregressive transformer-based generative model with WavLM pre-trained model. It can produce individual and stylized full-body co-speech gestures only using raw speech audio, eliminating the need for complex multimodal processing and manually annotated. Firstly, considering that speech audio not only contains acoustic and semantic features but also conveys personality traits, emotions, and more subtle information related to accompanying gestures, we pioneer the adaptation of WavLM, a large-scale pre-trained model, to extract low-level and high-level audio information. Secondly, we introduce an adaptive layer norm architecture in the transformer-based layer to learn the relationship between speech information and accompanying gestures. Extensive subjective evaluation experiments are conducted on the Trinity, ZEGGS, and BEAT datasets to confirm the WavLM and the model's ability to synthesize natural co-speech gestures with various styles.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

A Survey on Generative Diffusion Model

Deep learning shows excellent potential in generation tasks thanks to deep latent representation. Generative models are classes of models that can generate observations randomly concerning certain implied parameters. Recently, the diffusion Model has become a rising class of generative models by its power-generating ability. Nowadays, great achievements have been reached. More applications except for computer vision, speech generation, bioinformatics, and natural language processing are to be explored in this field. However, the diffusion model has its genuine drawback of a slow generation process, single data types, low likelihood, and the inability for dimension reduction. They are leading to many enhanced works. This survey makes a summary of the field of the diffusion model. We first state the main problem with two landmark works -- DDPM and DSM, and a unified landmark work -- Score SDE. Then, we present improved techniques for existing problems in the diffusion-based model field, including speed-up improvement For model speed-up improvement, data structure diversification, likelihood optimization, and dimension reduction. Regarding existing models, we also provide a benchmark of FID score, IS, and NLL according to specific NFE. Moreover, applications with diffusion models are introduced including computer vision, sequence modeling, audio, and AI for science. Finally, there is a summarization of this field together with limitations \& further directions. The summation of existing well-classified methods is in our Github:https://github.com/chq1155/A-Survey-on-Generative-Diffusion-Model

Dior-CVAE: Diffusion Priors in Variational Dialog Generation

Conditional variational autoencoders (CVAEs) have been used recently for diverse response generation, by introducing latent variables to represent the relationship between a dialog context and its potential responses. However, the diversity of the generated responses brought by a CVAE model is limited due to the oversimplified assumption of the isotropic Gaussian prior. We propose, Dior-CVAE, a hierarchical CVAE model with an informative prior produced by a diffusion model. Dior-CVAE derives a series of layer-wise latent variables using attention mechanism and infusing them into decoder layers accordingly. We propose memory dropout in the latent infusion to alleviate posterior collapse. The prior distribution of the latent variables is parameterized by a diffusion model to introduce a multimodal distribution. Overall, experiments on two popular open-domain dialog datasets indicate the advantages of our approach over previous Transformer-based variational dialog models in dialog response generation. We publicly release the code for reproducing Dior-CVAE and all baselines at https://github.com/SkyFishMoon/Latent-Diffusion-Response-Generation

An investigation of speaker independent phrase break models in End-to-End TTS systems

This paper presents our work on phrase break prediction in the context of end-to-end TTS systems, motivated by the following questions: (i) Is there any utility in incorporating an explicit phrasing model in an end-to-end TTS system?, and (ii) How do you evaluate the effectiveness of a phrasing model in an end-to-end TTS system? In particular, the utility and effectiveness of phrase break prediction models are evaluated in in the context of childrens story synthesis, using listener comprehension. We show by means of perceptual listening evaluations that there is a clear preference for stories synthesized after predicting the location of phrase breaks using a trained phrasing model, over stories directly synthesized without predicting the location of phrase breaks.Comment: Submitted for review to IEEE Acces