Data-driven Head Motion Generation through Natural Gaze-Head Coordination
Authors: Xiaohan Liu, Yilin Wen, Yusuke Sugano
Organizations: Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo Komaba 4-6-1, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
We present the first data-driven approach to model temporal gaze-head coordination from large-scale in-the-wild facial videos. To obtain training data for generalizable learning, we propose an automatic pipeline that extracts natural yet diverse gaze and head motions with off-the-shelf appearance-based gaze estimators. To capture the probabilistic correlation and temporal dynamics of gaze-head coordination, we build our model on a generative conditional Variational Autoencoder for plausible yet diverse gaze-conditioned head motion generations. We further apply our framework to gaze-controlled facial video generation, where we enable video generation with natural and realistic head motion correlated to the input gaze - an aspect that has not been emphasized before. Human evaluation and quantitative comparisons demonstrate our method's effectiveness and validate our design choices, with evaluators showing statistically significant preference for our approach over baseline methods.
Controlling human motion and camera movement is essential for faithful human-oriented video generation, yet remains challenging in multi-person scenes with large body motions, occlusions, and dynamic cameras. Existing pipelines typically rely on visual motion sequences, such as skeleton maps, pose maps, or rendered body representations, for motion control, while using camera embeddings for camera control. Such heterogeneous control interfaces force video generation models to reconcile pixel-aligned visual cues with non-visual geometric embeddings, making motion-camera attribution difficult and sensitive to camera estimation errors. We propose \textbf{UniMoCa}, a representation-driven framework that unifies motion and camera controls in visual space. At the core of UniMoCa is \textbf{Motion-Camera Visual Proxy} (\textbf{MCVP}), a mutually-sharable novel representation that converts 3D human motion and camera trajectories extracted from driving videos into an identity-neutral visual proxy. MCVP renders temporally aligned human geometry under the recovered camera trajectory and augments it with explicit camera trajectory markers, replacing heterogeneous visual-parametric controls with distinguishable visual cues. As both control factors are represented in the same visual space, they become mutually compatible rather than heterogeneous, enabling consistent joint reasoning and editing during video generation. We further curate a \textbf{MCVP-Video} dataset covering complex actions, multi-person interactions, and diverse camera trajectories. Experiments based on the Wan2.2 I2V show that UniMoCa achieves substantial gains in human motion control, camera control, temporal consistency, and camera-aware robustness with minimal additional complexity. More details are shown in our Project page: https://tanliming-daniel.github.io/UniMoCa/.
We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/
Camera motion control is essential for directing viewpoint changes in generative systems. However, existing methods typically condition the generation process on a single specific modality, such as explicit pose trajectories or reference videos, limiting their ability to support heterogeneous user inputs. To address this limitation, we present TriMotion, a modality-agnostic framework for camera-controlled video generation that maps video, pose, and text inputs, describing the same camera trajectory into a shared motion embedding space. Learning such a space requires synchronized supervision across modalities. Therefore, we build the Motion Triplet Dataset by extending a Multi-Cam Video Dataset with geometry-grounded motion descriptions derived from camera extrinsics. We further introduce a latent motion consistency objective that leverages the motion embedding space to encourage the generated video to follow the target camera trajectory directly in latent space, avoiding the cost of pixel-space decoding. Extensive experiments show that TriMotion generates high-quality videos that accurately follow the target camera trajectories across all three modalities. Beyond standard generation, the shared motion embedding space also enables flexible applications such as sequential motion composition and cross-modal motion interpolation.