UniCUE: Unified Recognition and Generation Framework for Chinese Cued Speech Video-to-Speech Generation

Cued Speech (CS) enhances lipreading through hand coding, providing precise speech perception support for the hearing-impaired. CS Video-to-Speech generation (CSV2S) task aims to convert the CS visual expressions (CS videos) of hearing-impaired individuals into comprehensible speech signals. Direct generation of speech from CS video (called single CSV2S) yields poor performance due to insufficient CS data. Current research mostly focuses on CS Recognition (CSR), which convert video content into linguistic text. Based on this, one straightforward way of CSV2S is to combine CSR with a Text-to-Speech system. This combined architecture relies on text as an intermediate medium for stepwise cross-modal alignment, which may lead to error propagation and temporal misalignment between speech and video dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that directly generates speech from CS videos without relying on intermediate text. Building upon this, we propose UniCUE, the first unified framework for CSV2S, whose core innovation lies in the integration of the CSR task that provides fine-grained visual-semantic information to facilitate speech generation from CS videos. More precisely, (1) a novel fine-grained semantic alignment pool to ensure precise mapping between visual features and speech contents; (2) a VisioPhonetic adapter to bridge cross-task representations, ensuring seamless compatibility between two distinct tasks (i.e., CSV2S and CSR); (3) a pose-aware visual processor is introduced to enhance fine-grained spatiotemporal correlations between lip and hand movements in CS video. Experiments on our new established Chinese CS dataset (14 cuers1: 8 hearing-impaired and 6 normal-hearing) show that our UniCUE significantly reduces Word Error Rate by 78.3% and improves lip-speech synchronization by 32% compared to the single CSV2S.

AudioGenie: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Multimodality-to-Multiaudio Generation

Multimodality-to-Multiaudio (MM2MA) generation faces significant challenges in synthesizing diverse and contextually aligned audio types (e.g., sound effects, speech, music, and songs) from multimodal inputs (e.g., video, text, images), owing to the scarcity of high-quality paired datasets and the lack of robust multi-task learning frameworks. Recently, multi-agent system shows great potential in tackling the above issues. However, directly applying it to MM2MA task presents three critical challenges: (1) inadequate fine-grained understanding of multimodal inputs (especially for video), (2) the inability of single models to handle diverse audio events, and (3) the absence of self-correction mechanisms for reliable outputs. To this end, we propose AudioGenie, a novel training-free multi-agent system featuring a dual-layer architecture with a generation team and a supervisor team. For the generation team, a fine-grained task decomposition and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) collaborative entity are designed for dynamic model selection, and a trial-and-error iterative refinement module is designed for self-correction. The supervisor team ensures temporal-spatial consistency and verifies outputs through feedback loops. Moreover, we build MA-Bench, the first benchmark for MM2MA tasks, comprising 198 annotated videos with multi-type audios. Experiments demonstrate that our AudioGenie outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across 9 metrics in 8 tasks. User study further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of quality, accuracy, alignment, and aesthetic. The anonymous project website with samples can be found at https://audiogenie.github.io/.

A Comprehensive Survey on Human Video Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Insights

Human video generation is a dynamic and rapidly evolving task that aims to synthesize 2D human body video sequences with generative models given control conditions such as text, audio, and pose. With the potential for wide-ranging applications in film, gaming, and virtual communication, the ability to generate natural and realistic human video is critical. Recent advancements in generative models have laid a solid foundation for the growing interest in this area. Despite the significant progress, the task of human video generation remains challenging due to the consistency of characters, the complexity of human motion, and difficulties in their relationship with the environment. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state of human video generation, marking, to the best of our knowledge, the first extensive literature review in this domain. We start with an introduction to the fundamentals of human video generation and the evolution of generative models that have facilitated the field's growth. We then examine the main methods employed for three key sub-tasks within human video generation: text-driven, audio-driven, and pose-driven motion generation. These areas are explored concerning the conditions that guide the generation process. Furthermore, we offer a collection of the most commonly utilized datasets and the evaluation metrics that are crucial in assessing the quality and realism of generated videos. The survey concludes with a discussion of the current challenges in the field and suggests possible directions for future research. The goal of this survey is to offer the research community a clear and holistic view of the advancements in human video generation, highlighting the milestones achieved and the challenges that lie ahead.

Realistic Speech-to-Face Generation with Speech-Conditioned Latent Diffusion Model with Face Prior

Speech-to-face generation is an intriguing area of research that focuses on generating realistic facial images based on a speaker's audio speech. However, state-of-the-art methods employing GAN-based architectures lack stability and cannot generate realistic face images. To fill this gap, we propose a novel speech-to-face generation framework, which leverages a Speech-Conditioned Latent Diffusion Model, called SCLDM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to harness the exceptional modeling capabilities of diffusion models for speech-to-face generation. Preserving the shared identity information between speech and face is crucial in generating realistic results. Therefore, we employ contrastive pre-training for both the speech encoder and the face encoder. This pre-training strategy facilitates effective alignment between the attributes of speech, such as age and gender, and the corresponding facial characteristics in the face images. Furthermore, we tackle the challenge posed by excessive diversity in the synthesis process caused by the diffusion model. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the concept of residuals by integrating a statistical face prior to the diffusion process. This addition helps to eliminate the shared component across the faces and enhances the subtle variations captured by the speech condition. Extensive quantitative, qualitative, and user study experiments demonstrate that our method can produce more realistic face images while preserving the identity of the speaker better than state-of-the-art methods. Highlighting the notable enhancements, our method demonstrates significant gains in all metrics on the AVSpeech dataset and Voxceleb dataset, particularly noteworthy are the improvements of 32.17 and 32.72 on the cosine distance metric for the two datasets, respectively.

A Survey on Deep Multi-modal Learning for Body Language Recognition and Generation

Body language (BL) refers to the non-verbal communication expressed through physical movements, gestures, facial expressions, and postures. It is a form of communication that conveys information, emotions, attitudes, and intentions without the use of spoken or written words. It plays a crucial role in interpersonal interactions and can complement or even override verbal communication. Deep multi-modal learning techniques have shown promise in understanding and analyzing these diverse aspects of BL. The survey emphasizes their applications to BL generation and recognition. Several common BLs are considered i.e., Sign Language (SL), Cued Speech (CS), Co-speech (CoS), and Talking Head (TH), and we have conducted an analysis and established the connections among these four BL for the first time. Their generation and recognition often involve multi-modal approaches. Benchmark datasets for BL research are well collected and organized, along with the evaluation of SOTA methods on these datasets. The survey highlights challenges such as limited labeled data, multi-modal learning, and the need for domain adaptation to generalize models to unseen speakers or languages. Future research directions are presented, including exploring self-supervised learning techniques, integrating contextual information from other modalities, and exploiting large-scale pre-trained multi-modal models. In summary, this survey paper provides a comprehensive understanding of deep multi-modal learning for various BL generations and recognitions for the first time. By analyzing advancements, challenges, and future directions, it serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in advancing this field. n addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for deep multi-modal learning for BL recognition and generation: https://github.com/wentaoL86/awesome-body-language.