Personal robots should adapt their co-speech gesture style to a new user without requiring model retraining. We present a training-free personalization pipeline that combines a frozen audio-conditioned diffusion prior with a gesture style encoder and lightweight conditioning adapters. The encoder is first trained to discriminate speaker identities and then jointly refined with the adapters using the diffusion objective, enabling a reusable style embedding to be extracted from approximately 10 seconds of enrollment motion through a single forward pass. To support this setting, we also release a Quest~3 capture application and a dataset of spontaneous co-speech motion from ten participants. We evaluate the system on held-out speakers using Style Recognition Accuracy (SRA) and Fr'echet Gesture Distance (FGD) to measure personalization and motion quality. Our approach improves SRA from 27.6% for the frozen prior to 69.5% while preserving motion quality (FGD 34.2 versus 34.8), and replacing the enrollment embedding with another person's reduces SRA to 11.4%. The generated gestures are retargeted to a physical NAO robot, and this improvement also transfers to the robot deployment setting, where speech is synthesized using five TTS voices, retaining 67.3% SRA.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Personalized co-speech gestures executed on a real NAO robot for speakers never seen in training. For the same speech, each row compares the speaker’s own motion (real), our personalized output (ours), output conditioned on another person’s style embedding (wrong), and the frozen diffusion prior without personalization (prior). Top: an unseen BEAT speaker. Bottom: an unseen participant from our Quest 3 dataset.
Dataset
Duration (hours)
Speakers
Gesture
Trinity [ 25 ]
4
1
mo-cap
SCG [ 11 ]
33
6
video
TED-Ex [ 8 ]
100.8
1,764
video
ZeroEGGS [ 16 ]
2
1
mo-cap
BEAT [ 26 ]
35
30
mo-cap
TalkSHOW [ 12 ]
26.9
4
video
TABLE I: Open-source co-speech gesture datasets.
Fig. 2: Quest 3 upper-body and hand capture interface.
Fig. 3: Overview of the proposed pipeline. Top: the style encoder is initialized by separating TED-Ex and BEAT identities, then jointly refined with zero-initialized style adapters while the diffusion prior remains frozen. Bottom: at deployment, a large language model (LLM) and TTS provide speech, enrollment motion provides a target style embedding, and the shared denoiser combines audio and style through guidance weights ga and gs . The generated direction vectors are retargeted analytically to the NAO.
Unseen BEAT/Trinity speakers
Quest 3
TTS audio
Condition
SRA (%) ↑
FGD ↓
SRA (%) ↑
FGD ↓
Target SRA (%) ↑
Chance
14.3
–
10.0
–
14.3
Real-motion ceiling
86.7±10.1
–
68.7±2.7
–
–
Frozen prior
27.6±2.5
34.8±6.6
10.0±0.4
39.4±4.1
–
Wrong style embedding ( g=6 )
11.4±4.4
43.8±8.4
4.5±2.2
49.1±14.1
1.6±1.7
Ours ( g=6 )
69.5±11.1
34.2±5.0
32.3±8.5
30.5±4.5
67.3±10.8
TABLE II: Five-seed personalization results. The TTS column reports seven-way target SRA, macro-averaged across five voices. All personalized conditions use gs=6 . Values are mean ± sample standard deviation.
Fig. 4: Personalization–motion-quality trade-off across style-guidance strengths gs∈{4,5,6,7} on the BEAT/Trinity and Quest 3 test sets (five-seed mean). Each curve connects the four operating points; the dashed vertical line marks the frozen prior’s FGD for that test set. The selected gs=6 point (filled) stays at or below the frozen FGD while maximizing SRA. Higher SRA and lower FGD are better.
Motion supplied to retargeting
Robot SRA (%) ↑
Chance
14.3
Retargeted real motion
53.8±14.0
Frozen prior
15.1±2.6
Wrong style embedding ( gs=6 )
8.5±4.9
Ours ( gs=6 )
33.5±5.2
TABLE III: Identity recognition after eight-joint NAO robot retargeting.
Encoder
BEAT (%)
TED-Ex (%)
TCN (TED-Ex)
67.4
63.2
TCN (BEAT)
63.6
13.8
TCN (combined)
82.5
62.8
ZeroEGGS GRU
78.5
69.3
ZeroEGGS attention
84.8
80.5
TABLE IV: Encoder identity recognition on unseen BEAT and TED-Ex motion.
We propose PersonaGesture, a diffusion-based pipeline for single-reference co-speech gesture personalization of unseen speakers. Given target speech and one motion clip from a new speaker, the model must synthesize gestures that follow the new utterance while retaining speaker-specific pose choices, without per-speaker optimization. This setting is useful for avatars and virtual agents, but it is hard because the reference mixes stable speaker habits with utterance-specific trajectories. PersonaGesture consists of two key components, Adaptive Style Infusion (ASI) and Implicit Distribution Rectification (IDR), to separate temporal identity evidence from residual statistic correction. A Style Perceiver first encodes the variable-length reference into compact speaker-memory tokens. ASI injects these tokens into denoising through zero-initialized residual cross-attention, enabling style evidence to affect motion formation without replacing the pretrained speech-to-motion prior. Building on this, IDR applies a length-aware diagonal affine map in latent space to correct residual channel-wise moments estimated from the same reference. Across BEAT2 and ZeroEGGS, we evaluate quantitative metrics, reference-identity controls, same-audio diagnostics, qualitative comparisons, and human preference. Experiments show that separating denoising-time speaker memory from conservative post-generation moment correction improves unseen-speaker personalization over collapsed style codes, full-reference attention, and one-clip finetuning. Project: https://xiangyue-zhang.github.io/PersonaGesture.
Xiangyue Zhang, Yiyi Cai, Kunhang Li +6
The University of Tokyo · Shanda AI Research Tokyo · Renmin University +1
Co-speech gesture generation aims to synthesize realistic body movements that are semantically coherent with speech and faithful to a user-specified gestural style. Existing VQ-VAE based co-speech gesture generation methods improve generation quality but fail to encode semantic structure into the motion representation or explicitly disentangle content from style, limiting both semantic coherence and personalization fidelity. We present PersonaGest, a two-stage framework addressing both limitations. In the first stage, a semantic-guided RVQ-VAE disentangles motion content and gestural style within the residual quantization structure, where a Semantic-Aware Motion Codebook (SMoC) organizes the content codebook by gesture semantics and contrastive learning further enforces content-style separation. In the second stage, a Masked Generative Transformer generates content tokens via a semantic-aware re-masking strategy, followed by a cascade of Style Residual Transformers conditioned on a reference motion prompt for style control. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on objective metrics and perceptual user studies, with strong style consistency to the reference prompt. Our project page with demo videos is available at https://danny-nus.github.io/PersonaGest/
Junchuan Zhao, Qifan Liang, Ye Wang
School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Generating full-body co-speech motion for humanoid robots requires coordinating speech prosody, linguistic content, and embodiment-specific motion. To this end, we present ECHO-G, a framework jointly conditioned on speech audio and timed transcripts. Its Speech-Grounded Diffusion Transformer (SGDiT) combines frame-aligned acoustic features with token-level linguistic context, preserving their distinct granularities. Trained with rectified flow matching, it models one-to-many utterance-motion relationships directly in robot space. To support training and evaluation, we introduce a BEAT2-derived audio-text-robot dataset and a benchmark covering co-speech characteristics, robot-motion quality, and runtime efficiency. Comparative evaluation supports direct robot-space generation over the evaluated human-motion generation and retargeting pipelines, while modality ablations highlight the benefits of joint audio-text conditioning. We further demonstrate deployment on a physical humanoid robot. A complementary video-rating study also favors joint conditioning over the alternatives. The dataset and training, inference, and evaluation code are available through our project page.
Yizhao Li, Pusen Gao, Ming Wang +3
Beihang University · Mondo Robotics · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +1