Puppeteer: Object-Grounded Posture-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Researchers present Puppeteer, a posture-aware, object-grounded diffusion model generating physically consistent co-speech gestures with temporal control.
Puppeteer decomposes long gestures into structured primitives encoded by a causal variational autoencoder into temporally ordered latent tokens. Conditional diffusion in the causal latent space conditions on speech signals, motion history, an initial posture reference, and object geometry to synthesize physically consistent gestures. The authors also introduce new evaluation metrics and release SceneGes, the first curated synthetic 3D dataset of embodied co-speech gestures with corresponding 3D objects.