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Main Authors: Zhang, Juze, Chen, Changan, Chen, Xin, Yu, Heng, Xiang, Tiange, Khan, Ali Sartaz, Lakshmikanth, Shrinidhi K., Adeli, Ehsan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14234
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author Zhang, Juze
Chen, Changan
Chen, Xin
Yu, Heng
Xiang, Tiange
Khan, Ali Sartaz
Lakshmikanth, Shrinidhi K.
Adeli, Ehsan
author_facet Zhang, Juze
Chen, Changan
Chen, Xin
Yu, Heng
Xiang, Tiange
Khan, Ali Sartaz
Lakshmikanth, Shrinidhi K.
Adeli, Ehsan
contents Human communication is inherently multimodal and social: words, prosody, and body language jointly carry intent. Yet most prior systems model human behavior as a translation task co-speech gesture or text-to-motion that maps a fixed utterance to motion clips-without requiring agentic decision-making about when to move, what to do, or how to adapt across multi-turn dialogue. This leads to brittle timing, weak social grounding, and fragmented stacks where speech, text, and motion are trained or inferred in isolation. We introduce ViBES (Voice in Behavioral Expression and Synchrony), a conversational 3D agent that jointly plans language and movement and executes dialogue-conditioned body actions. Concretely, ViBES is a speech-language-behavior (SLB) model with a mixture-of-modality-experts (MoME) backbone: modality-partitioned transformer experts for speech, facial expression, and body motion. The model processes interleaved multimodal token streams with hard routing by modality (parameters are split per expert), while sharing information through cross-expert attention. By leveraging strong pretrained speech-language models, the agent supports mixed-initiative interaction: users can speak, type, or issue body-action directives mid-conversation, and the system exposes controllable behavior hooks for streaming responses. We further benchmark on multi-turn conversation with automatic metrics of dialogue-motion alignment and behavior quality, and observe consistent gains over strong co-speech and text-to-motion baselines. ViBES goes beyond "speech-conditioned motion generation" toward agentic virtual bodies where language, prosody, and movement are jointly generated, enabling controllable, socially competent 3D interaction. Code and data will be made available at: ai.stanford.edu/~juze/ViBES/
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViBES: A Conversational Agent with Behaviorally-Intelligent 3D Virtual Body
Zhang, Juze
Chen, Changan
Chen, Xin
Yu, Heng
Xiang, Tiange
Khan, Ali Sartaz
Lakshmikanth, Shrinidhi K.
Adeli, Ehsan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human communication is inherently multimodal and social: words, prosody, and body language jointly carry intent. Yet most prior systems model human behavior as a translation task co-speech gesture or text-to-motion that maps a fixed utterance to motion clips-without requiring agentic decision-making about when to move, what to do, or how to adapt across multi-turn dialogue. This leads to brittle timing, weak social grounding, and fragmented stacks where speech, text, and motion are trained or inferred in isolation. We introduce ViBES (Voice in Behavioral Expression and Synchrony), a conversational 3D agent that jointly plans language and movement and executes dialogue-conditioned body actions. Concretely, ViBES is a speech-language-behavior (SLB) model with a mixture-of-modality-experts (MoME) backbone: modality-partitioned transformer experts for speech, facial expression, and body motion. The model processes interleaved multimodal token streams with hard routing by modality (parameters are split per expert), while sharing information through cross-expert attention. By leveraging strong pretrained speech-language models, the agent supports mixed-initiative interaction: users can speak, type, or issue body-action directives mid-conversation, and the system exposes controllable behavior hooks for streaming responses. We further benchmark on multi-turn conversation with automatic metrics of dialogue-motion alignment and behavior quality, and observe consistent gains over strong co-speech and text-to-motion baselines. ViBES goes beyond "speech-conditioned motion generation" toward agentic virtual bodies where language, prosody, and movement are jointly generated, enabling controllable, socially competent 3D interaction. Code and data will be made available at: ai.stanford.edu/~juze/ViBES/
title ViBES: A Conversational Agent with Behaviorally-Intelligent 3D Virtual Body
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14234