skip to main content
10.1145/3577190.3616120acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesicmi-mlmiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large-scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settings

Published: 09 October 2023 Publication History
  • Get Citation Alerts
  • Abstract

    This paper reports on the GENEA Challenge 2023, in which participating teams built speech-driven gesture-generation systems using the same speech and motion dataset, followed by a joint evaluation. This year’s challenge provided data on both sides of a dyadic interaction, allowing teams to generate full-body motion for an agent given its speech (text and audio) and the speech and motion of the interlocutor. We evaluated 12 submissions and 2 baselines together with held-out motion-capture data in several large-scale user studies. The studies focused on three aspects: 1) the human-likeness of the motion, 2) the appropriateness of the motion for the agent’s own speech whilst controlling for the human-likeness of the motion, and 3) the appropriateness of the motion for the behaviour of the interlocutor in the interaction, using a setup that controls for both the human-likeness of the motion and the agent’s own speech. We found a large span in human-likeness between challenge submissions, with a few systems rated close to human mocap. Appropriateness seems far from being solved, with most submissions performing in a narrow range slightly above chance, far behind natural motion. The effect of the interlocutor is even more subtle, with submitted systems at best performing barely above chance. Interestingly, a dyadic system being highly appropriate for agent speech does not necessarily imply high appropriateness for the interlocutor. Additional material is available via the project website at svito-zar.github.io/GENEAchallenge2023/.

    Supplementary Material

    Appendix with supplementary tables and figures (genea_2023_icmi_final_appendix.pdf)

    References

    [1]
    Amal Abdulrahman and Deborah Richards. 2022. Is natural necessary? Human voice versus synthetic voice for intelligent virtual agents. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 6, 7 (2022), 51.
    [2]
    Simon Alexanderson, Gustav Eje Henter, Taras Kucherenko, and Jonas Beskow. 2020. Style-controllable speech-driven gesture synthesis using normalising flows. Comput. Graph. Forum 39, 2 (2020), 487–496. https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.13946
    [3]
    Simon Alexanderson, Rajmund Nagy, Jonas Beskow, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2023. Listen, denoise, action! audio-driven motion synthesis with diffusion models. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 42, 4 (2023), 1–20.
    [4]
    Yoav Benjamini and Yosef Hochberg. 1995. Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J. Roy. Stat. Soc. B Met. 57, 1 (1995), 289–300.
    [5]
    Kirsten Bergmann and Stefan Kopp. 2009. GNetIc – Using Bayesian decision networks for iconic gesture generation. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents(IVA ’09). Springer, 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04380-2_12
    [6]
    Uttaran Bhattacharya, Elizabeth Childs, Nicholas Rewkowski, and Dinesh Manocha. 2021. Speech2AffectiveGestures: Synthesizing co-speech gestures with generative adversarial affective expression learning. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia(MM ’21). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474085.3475223
    [7]
    Justine Cassell, Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson, and Timothy Bickmore. 2001. BEAT: The behavior expression animation toolkit. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH. ACM, 477–486. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-08373-4_8
    [8]
    Che-Jui Chang, Sen Zhang, and Mubbasir Kapadia. 2022. The IVI Lab Entry to the GENEA Challenge 2022 – A Tacotron2 Based Method for Co-Speech Gesture Generation With Locality-Constraint Attention Mechanism. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’22). ACM, 784–789. https://doi.org/10.1145/3536221.3558060
    [9]
    Ankur Chemburkar, Shuhong Lu, and Andrew Andrew. 2023. Discrete Diffusion for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis. In Companion Publication of the 2023 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery.
    [10]
    Chung-Cheng Chiu, Louis-Philippe Morency, and Stacy Marsella. 2015. Predicting co-verbal gestures: A deep and temporal modeling approach. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents(IVA ’15). Springer, 152–166. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_17
    [11]
    Anna Deichler, Shivam Mehta, Simon Alexanderson, and Jonas Beskow. 2023. Diffusion-based co-speech gesture generation using joint text and audio representation. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.
    [12]
    Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, and Rachel McDonnell. 2021. ExpressGesture: Expressive gesture generation from speech through database matching. Comput. Animat. Virt. W. 32, 3-4 (2021), e2016. https://doi.org/10.1002/cav.2016
    [13]
    Gerald J. Hahn and William Q. Meeker. 1991. Statistical Intervals: A Guide for Practitioners. Vol. 92. John Wiley & Sons.
    [14]
    Leon Harz, Hendric Voß, and Stefan Kopp. 2023. FEIN-Z: Autoregressive Behavior Cloning for Speech-Driven Gesture Generation. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.
    [15]
    Zhiyuan He. 2022. Automatic quality assessment of speech-driven synthesized gestures. Int. J. Comput. Games. Tech. 2022 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/1828293
    [16]
    Judith Holler, Kobin H. Kendrick, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2018. Processing language in face-to-face conversation: Questions with gestures get faster responses. Psychon. B. Rev. 25, 5 (2018), 1900–1908. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1363-z
    [17]
    Sture Holm. 1979. A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 6, 2 (1979), 65–70.
    [18]
    International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Standardisation Sector. 1996. Methods for subjective determination of transmission quality. Recommendation ITU-T P.800. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-P.800-199608-I
    [19]
    Patrik Jonell, Taras Kucherenko, Gustav Eje Henter, and Jonas Beskow. 2020. Let’s face it: Probabilistic multi-modal interlocutor-aware generation of facial gestures in dyadic settings. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents(IVA ’20). ACM, Article 31, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423911
    [20]
    Patrik Jonell, Youngwoo Yoon, Pieter Wolfert, Taras Kucherenko, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2021. HEMVIP: Human evaluation of multiple videos in parallel. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’21). ACM, 707–711. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462244.3479957
    [21]
    Gwantae Kim, Yuanming Li, and Hanseok Ko. 2023. The KU-ISPL entry to the GENEA Challenge 2023-A Diffusion Model for Co-speech Gesture generation. In Companion Publication of the 2023 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery.
    [22]
    Gwantae Kim, Seonghyeok Noh, Insung Ham, and Hanseok Ko. 2023. MPE4G: Multimodal Pretrained Encoder for Co-Speech Gesture Generation. In ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 1–5.
    [23]
    Geunmo Kim, Jaewoong Yoo, and Hyedong Jung. 2023. Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Audio and Text Feature Engineering. In Companion Publication of the 2023 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery.
    [24]
    Vladislav Korzun, Anna Beloborodova, and Arkady Ilin. 2023. The FineMotion entry to the GENEA Challenge 2023: DeepPhase for conversational gestures generation. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.
    [25]
    Taras Kucherenko, Patrik Jonell, Sanne van Waveren, Gustav Eje Henter, Simon Alexanderson, Iolanda Leite, and Hedvig Kjellström. 2020. Gesticulator: A framework for semantically-aware speech-driven gesture generation. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’20). ACM, 242–250. https://doi.org/10.1145/3382507.3418815
    [26]
    Taras Kucherenko, Patrik Jonell, Youngwoo Yoon, Pieter Wolfert, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2021. A large, crowdsourced evaluation of gesture generation systems on common data: The GENEA Challenge 2020. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces(IUI ’21). 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397481.3450692
    [27]
    Taras Kucherenko, Rajmund Nagy, Youngwoo Yoon, Jieyeon Woo, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2023. The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large-scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settings. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.
    [28]
    Taras Kucherenko, Pieter Wolfert, Youngwoo Yoon, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2023. Evaluating gesture-generation in a large-scale open challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08737 (2023).
    [29]
    Gilwoo Lee, Zhiwei Deng, Shugao Ma, Takaaki Shiratori, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa, and Yaser Sheikh. 2019. Talking With Hands 16.2M: A large-scale dataset of synchronized body-finger motion and audio for conversational motion analysis and synthesis. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision(ICCV ’19). IEEE, 763–772. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV.2019.00085
    [30]
    Sergey Levine, Philipp Krähenbühl, Sebastian Thrun, and Vladlen Koltun. 2010. Gesture controllers. ACM Trans. Graph. 29, 4, Article 124 (2010), 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1778765.1778861
    [31]
    Haiyang Liu, Zihao Zhu, Naoya Iwamoto, Yichen Peng, Zhengqing Li, You Zhou, Elif Bozkurt, and Bo Zheng. 2022. BEAT: A large-scale semantic and emotional multi-modal dataset for conversational gestures synthesis. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision(ECCV ’22). Springer, 612–630.
    [32]
    David McNeill. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383099403700208
    [33]
    Shivam Mehta, Siyang Wang, Simon Alexanderson, Jonas Beskow, Éva Székely, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2023. Diff-TTSG: Denoising probabilistic integrated speech and gesture synthesis. In Proceedings of the ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop(SSW ’23). ISCA.
    [34]
    Simbarashe Nyatsanga, Taras Kucherenko, Chaitanya Ahuja, Gustav Eje Henter, and Michael Neff. 2023. A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 42. Wiley Online Library, 569–596.
    [35]
    David Obremski, Helena Babette Hering, Paula Friedrich, and Birgit Lugrin. 2022. Exploratory Study on the Perception of Intelligent Virtual Agents With Non-Native Accents Using Synthetic and Natural Speech in German. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’22). 15–24.
    [36]
    Manuel Rebol, Christian Güti, and Krzysztof Pietroszek. 2021. Passing a non-verbal Turing test: Evaluating gesture animations generated from speech. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces(VR ’21). IEEE, 573–581. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR50410.2021.00082
    [37]
    Giampiero Salvi, Jonas Beskow, Samer Al Moubayed, and Björn Granström. 2009. SynFace—Speech-driven facial animation for virtual speech-reading support. EURASIP J. Audio Spee., Article 191940 (2009), 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1155/2009/191940
    [38]
    Viktor Schmuck, Nguyen Tan Viet Tuyen, and Oya Celiktutan. 2023. The KCL-SAIR team’s entry to the GENEA Challenge 2023 Exploring Role-based Gesture Generation in Dyadic Interactions: Listener vs. Speaker. In Companion Publication of the 2023 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery.
    [39]
    Rodolfo Luis Tonoli, Leonardo Boulitreau de Menezes Martins Marques, Lucas Hideki Ueda, and Paula Paro Dornhofer Costa. 2023. Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models Aided by Speech Activity Information. In Companion Publication of the 2023 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery.
    [40]
    Siyang Wang, Simon Alexanderson, Joakim Gustafson, Jonas Beskow, Gustav Eje Henter, and Éva Székely. 2021. Integrated speech and gesture synthesis. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’21). ACM, 177–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462244.3479914
    [41]
    Jonathan Windle, Iain Matthews, Ben Milner, and Sarah Taylor. 2023. The UEA Digital Humans entry to the GENEA Challenge 2023. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.
    [42]
    Pieter Wolfert, Jeffrey M. Girard, Taras Kucherenko, and Tony Belpaeme. 2021. To rate or not to rate: Investigating evaluation methods for generated co-speech gestures. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’21). ACM, 494–502. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462244.3479889
    [43]
    Sicheng Yang, Zhiyong Wu, Minglei Li, Zhensong Zhang, Lei Hao, Weihong Bao, Ming Cheng, and Long Xiao. 2023. DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.04919 (2023).
    [44]
    Sicheng Yang, Zhiyong Wu, Minglei Li, Zhensong Zhang, Lei Hao, Weihong Bao, and Haolin Zhuang. 2023. QPGesture: Quantization-Based and Phase-Guided Motion Matching for Natural Speech-Driven Gesture Generation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2321–2330.
    [45]
    Sicheng Yang, Haiwei Xue, Zhensong Zhang, Minglei Li, Zhiyong Wu, Xiaofei Wu, Songcen Xu, and Zonghong Dai. 2023. The DiffuseStyleGesture+ entry to the GENEA Challenge 2023. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.
    [46]
    Payam Jome Yazdian, Mo Chen, and Angelica Lim. 2022. Gesture2Vec: Clustering gestures using representation learning methods for co-speech gesture generation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems(IROS ’22). 3100–3107.
    [47]
    Youngwoo Yoon, Bok Cha, Joo-Haeng Lee, Minsu Jang, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, and Geehyuk Lee. 2020. Speech gesture generation from the trimodal context of text, audio, and speaker identity. ACM Transactions on Graphics 39, 6, Article 222 (2020), 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3414685.3417838
    [48]
    Youngwoo Yoon, Woo-Ri Ko, Minsu Jang, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, and Geehyuk Lee. 2019. Robots learn social skills: End-to-end learning of co-speech gesture generation for humanoid robots. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(ICRA ’19). IEEE, 4303–4309. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2019.8793720
    [49]
    Youngwoo Yoon, Keunwoo Park, Minsu Jang, Jaehong Kim, and Geehyuk Lee. 2021. SGToolkit: An interactive gesture authoring toolkit for embodied conversational agents. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology(UIST ’21). ACM, 826–840. https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474789
    [50]
    Youngwoo Yoon, Pieter Wolfert, Taras Kucherenko, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2022. The GENEA Challenge 2022: A large evaluation of data-driven co-speech gesture generation. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’22). ACM.
    [51]
    Weiyu Zhao, Liangxiao Hu, and Shengping Zhang. 2023. DiffuGesture: Generating Human Gesture From Two-person Dialogue With Diffusion Models. In Companion Publication of the 2023 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23 Companion). ACM.
    [52]
    Zeyu Zhao, Nan Gao, Zhi Zeng, Guixuan Zhang, Jie Liu, and Shuwu Zhang. 2023. Gesture Motion Graphs for Few-Shot Speech-Driven Gesture Reenactment. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction(ICMI ’23). ACM.

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Exploring the Effectiveness of Evaluation Practices for Computer-Generated Nonverbal BehaviourApplied Sciences10.3390/app1404146014:4(1460)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Evaluating Gesture Generation in a Large-scale Open Challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022ACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/365637443:3(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
    • (2024)FreeTalker: Controllable Speech and Text-Driven Gesture Generation Based on Diffusion Models for Enhanced Speaker NaturalnessICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10447978(7945-7949)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
    • Show More Cited By

    Index Terms

    1. The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large-scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settings

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      ICMI '23: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
      October 2023
      858 pages
      ISBN:9798400700552
      DOI:10.1145/3577190
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 09 October 2023

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. dyadic interaction
      2. embodied conversational agents
      3. evaluation paradigms
      4. gesture generation
      5. interlocutor awareness

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Funding Sources

      Conference

      ICMI '23
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 453 of 1,080 submissions, 42%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)706
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)83
      Reflects downloads up to 27 Jul 2024

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Exploring the Effectiveness of Evaluation Practices for Computer-Generated Nonverbal BehaviourApplied Sciences10.3390/app1404146014:4(1460)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2024
      • (2024)Evaluating Gesture Generation in a Large-scale Open Challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022ACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/365637443:3(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
      • (2024)FreeTalker: Controllable Speech and Text-Driven Gesture Generation Based on Diffusion Models for Enhanced Speaker NaturalnessICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10447978(7945-7949)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
      • (2024)Unified Speech and Gesture Synthesis Using Flow MatchingICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10445998(8220-8224)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
      • (2023)Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models Aided by Speech Activity InformationCompanion Publication of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3610661.3616554(193-199)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
      • (2023)GENEA Workshop 2023: The 4th Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied AgentsProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3577190.3616856(822-823)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Diffusion-Based Co-Speech Gesture Generation Using Joint Text and Audio RepresentationProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3577190.3616117(755-762)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023

      View Options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      HTML Format

      View this article in HTML Format.

      HTML Format

      Get Access

      Login options

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media