HolisticSemGes: Semantic Grounding of Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Contrastive Flow-Matching

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Lanmiao, Ghaleb, Esam, Özyürek, Aslı, Yumak, Zerrin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Liu, Lanmiao
Ghaleb, Esam
Özyürek, Aslı
Yumak, Zerrin
author_facet Liu, Lanmiao
Ghaleb, Esam
Özyürek, Aslı
Yumak, Zerrin
contents While the field of co-speech gesture generation has seen significant advances, producing holistic, semantically grounded gestures remains a challenge. Existing approaches rely on external semantic retrieval methods, which limit their generalisation capability due to dependency on predefined linguistic rules. Flow-matching-based methods produce promising results; however, the network is optimised using only semantically congruent samples without exposure to negative examples, leading to learning rhythmic gestures rather than sparse motion, such as iconic and metaphoric gestures. Furthermore, by modelling body parts in isolation, the majority of methods fail to maintain crossmodal consistency. We introduce a Contrastive Flow Matching-based co-speech gesture generation model that uses mismatched audio-text conditions as negatives, training the velocity field to follow the correct motion trajectory while repelling semantically incongruent trajectories. Our model ensures cross-modal coherence by embedding text, audio, and holistic motion into a composite latent space via cosine and contrastive objectives. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets, BEAT2 and SHOW.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26553
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HolisticSemGes: Semantic Grounding of Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Contrastive Flow-Matching
Liu, Lanmiao
Ghaleb, Esam
Özyürek, Aslı
Yumak, Zerrin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While the field of co-speech gesture generation has seen significant advances, producing holistic, semantically grounded gestures remains a challenge. Existing approaches rely on external semantic retrieval methods, which limit their generalisation capability due to dependency on predefined linguistic rules. Flow-matching-based methods produce promising results; however, the network is optimised using only semantically congruent samples without exposure to negative examples, leading to learning rhythmic gestures rather than sparse motion, such as iconic and metaphoric gestures. Furthermore, by modelling body parts in isolation, the majority of methods fail to maintain crossmodal consistency. We introduce a Contrastive Flow Matching-based co-speech gesture generation model that uses mismatched audio-text conditions as negatives, training the velocity field to follow the correct motion trajectory while repelling semantically incongruent trajectories. Our model ensures cross-modal coherence by embedding text, audio, and holistic motion into a composite latent space via cosine and contrastive objectives. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets, BEAT2 and SHOW.
title HolisticSemGes: Semantic Grounding of Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Contrastive Flow-Matching
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26553