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Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge : the GENEA Challenge 2022

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Abstract
This paper reports on the second GENEA Challenge to benchmark data-driven automatic co-speech gesture generation. Participating teams used the same speech and motion dataset to build gesture-generation systems. Motion generated by all these systems was rendered to video using a standardised visualisation pipeline and evaluated in several large, crowdsourced user studies. Unlike when comparing different research papers, differences in results are here only due to differences between methods, enabling direct comparison between systems. The dataset was based on 18 hours of full-body motion capture, including fingers, of different persons engaging in a dyadic conversation. Ten teams participated in the challenge across two tiers: full-body and upper-body gesticulation. For each tier, we evaluated both the human-likeness of the gesture motion and its appropriateness for the specific speech signal. Our evaluations decouple human-likeness from gesture appropriateness, which has been a difficult problem in the field. The evaluation results show some synthetic gesture conditions being rated as significantly more human-like than 3D human motion capture. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been demonstrated before. On the other hand, all synthetic motion is found to be vastly less appropriate for the speech than the original motion-capture recordings. We also find that conventional objective metrics do not correlate well with subjective human-likeness ratings in this large evaluation. The one exception is the Fréchet gesture distance (FGD), which achieves a Kendall’s tau rank correlation of around -0.5. Based on the challenge results we formulate numerous recommendations for system building and evaluation.
Keywords
Animation, gesture generation, embodied, conversational agents, evaluation paradigms, SPEECH, ASSOCIATION, ANIMATION, BEAT

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MLA
Kucherenko, Taras, et al. “Evaluating Gesture Generation in a Large-Scale Open Challenge : The GENEA Challenge 2022.” ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS, vol. 43, no. 3, 2024, doi:10.1145/3656374.
APA
Kucherenko, T., Wolfert, P., Yoon, Y., Viegas, C., Nikolov, T., Tsakov, M., & Henter, G. E. (2024). Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge : the GENEA Challenge 2022. ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS, 43(3). https://doi.org/10.1145/3656374
Chicago author-date
Kucherenko, Taras, Pieter Wolfert, Youngwoo Yoon, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2024. “Evaluating Gesture Generation in a Large-Scale Open Challenge : The GENEA Challenge 2022.” ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS 43 (3). https://doi.org/10.1145/3656374.
Chicago author-date (all authors)
Kucherenko, Taras, Pieter Wolfert, Youngwoo Yoon, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter. 2024. “Evaluating Gesture Generation in a Large-Scale Open Challenge : The GENEA Challenge 2022.” ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS 43 (3). doi:10.1145/3656374.
Vancouver
1.
Kucherenko T, Wolfert P, Yoon Y, Viegas C, Nikolov T, Tsakov M, et al. Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge : the GENEA Challenge 2022. ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS. 2024;43(3).
IEEE
[1]
T. Kucherenko et al., “Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge : the GENEA Challenge 2022,” ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS, vol. 43, no. 3, 2024.
@article{01HZP46DRWZ4RKJACCSVZCNVJA,
  abstract     = {{This paper reports on the second GENEA Challenge to benchmark data-driven automatic co-speech gesture generation. Participating teams used the same speech and motion dataset to build gesture-generation systems. Motion generated by all these systems was rendered to video using a standardised visualisation pipeline and evaluated in several large, crowdsourced user studies. Unlike when comparing different research papers, differences in results are here only due to differences between methods, enabling direct comparison between systems. The dataset was based on 18 hours of full-body motion capture, including fingers, of different persons engaging in a dyadic conversation. Ten teams participated in the challenge across two tiers: full-body and upper-body gesticulation. For each tier, we evaluated both the human-likeness of the gesture motion and its appropriateness for the specific speech signal. Our evaluations decouple human-likeness from gesture appropriateness, which has been a difficult problem in the field.

            The evaluation results show some synthetic gesture conditions being rated as significantly more human-like than 3D human motion capture. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been demonstrated before. On the other hand, all synthetic motion is found to be vastly less appropriate for the speech than the original motion-capture recordings. We also find that conventional objective metrics do not correlate well with subjective human-likeness ratings in this large evaluation. The one exception is the Fréchet gesture distance (FGD), which achieves a Kendall’s tau rank correlation of around -0.5. Based on the challenge results we formulate numerous recommendations for system building and evaluation.
}},
  articleno    = {{32}},
  author       = {{Kucherenko, Taras and Wolfert, Pieter and Yoon, Youngwoo and Viegas, Carla and Nikolov, Teodor and Tsakov, Mihail and Henter, Gustav Eje}},
  issn         = {{0730-0301}},
  journal      = {{ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS}},
  keywords     = {{Animation,gesture generation,embodied,conversational agents,evaluation paradigms,SPEECH,ASSOCIATION,ANIMATION,BEAT}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{3}},
  pages        = {{28}},
  title        = {{Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge : the GENEA Challenge 2022}},
  url          = {{http://doi.org/10.1145/3656374}},
  volume       = {{43}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

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