Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Animating virtual avatars to make co-speech gestures facilitates various applications in human-machine interaction. The existing methods mainly rely on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which typically suffer from notorious mode collapse and unstable training, thus making it difficult to learn accurate audio-gesture joint distributions. In this work, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework, named Diffusion Co-Speech Gesture (DiffGesture), to effectively capture the cross-modal audio-to-gesture associations and preserve temporal coherence for high-fidelity audio-driven co-speech gesture generation. Specifically, we first establish the diffusion-conditional generation process on clips of skeleton sequences and audio to enable the whole framework. Then, a novel Diffusion Audio-Gesture Transformer is devised to better attend to the information from multiple modalities and model the long-term temporal dependency. Moreover, to eliminate temporal inconsistency, we propose an effective Diffusion Gesture Stabilizer with an annealed noise sampling strategy. Benefiting from the architectural advantages of diffusion models, we further incorporate implicit classifier-free guidance to trade off between diversity and gesture quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffGesture achieves state-of-theart performance, which renders coherent gestures with better mode coverage and stronger audio correlations. Code is available at https://github.com/Advocate99/DiffGesture.

RepBNN: towards a precise Binary Neural Network with Enhanced Feature Map via Repeating

Binary neural network (BNN) is an extreme quantization version of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with all features and weights mapped to just 1-bit. Although BNN saves a lot of memory and computation demand to make CNN applicable on edge or mobile devices, BNN suffers the drop of network performance due to the reduced representation capability after binarization. In this paper, we propose a new replaceable and easy-to-use convolution module RepConv, which enhances feature maps through replicating input or output along channel dimension by $\beta$ times without extra cost on the number of parameters and convolutional computation. We also define a set of RepTran rules to use RepConv throughout BNN modules like binary convolution, fully connected layer and batch normalization. Experiments demonstrate that after the RepTran transformation, a set of highly cited BNNs have achieved universally better performance than the original BNN versions. For example, the Top-1 accuracy of Rep-ReCU-ResNet-20, i.e., a RepBconv enhanced ReCU-ResNet-20, reaches 88.97% on CIFAR-10, which is 1.47% higher than that of the original network. And Rep-AdamBNN-ReActNet-A achieves 71.342% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, a fresh state-of-the-art result of BNNs. Code and models are available at:https://github.com/imfinethanks/Rep_AdamBNN.