ExGes: Expressive Human Motion Retrieval and Modulation for Audio-Driven Gesture Synthesis

Audio-driven human gesture synthesis is a crucial task with broad applications in virtual avatars, human-computer interaction, and creative content generation. Despite notable progress, existing methods often produce coarse gestures, lack expressiveness, and fail to fully align with audio semantics. To address these challenges, we propose ExGes, a novel retrieval-enhanced diffusion framework with three key designs: (1) a Motion Base Construction, which builds a gesture library from the training dataset; (2) a Motion Retrieval Module, employing contrastive learning and momentum distillation for retrieving fine-grained reference poses; and (3) a Precise Control Module, integrating partial masking and stochastic masking to enable flexible and fine-grained control. Experimental evaluations on BEAT2 demonstrate that ExGes reduces Fréchet Gesture Distance by 4.55%and improves motion diversity by 5.3% over EMAGE, with user studies revealing a 71.3% preference for its naturalness and semantic relevance.