SynerGest: Temporal-Spatial Synergistic Gesture Generation for Dyadic Conversations

Abstract

Co-speech gesture generation in dyadic conversations for creating immersive virtual avatars remains highly challenging. Existing models often struggle to balance kinematic stability with rhythmic responsiveness and suffer from semantic entanglement, leading to either generic mean-pose regression or unnatural micro-jitters. To address these challenges, we propose SynerGest, a high-fidelity dyadic gesture generation framework grounded in Contrastive Flow Matching (CFM). Specifically, our CFM objective explicitly penalizes mismatched semantic pairs during training, discouraging spatial shortcuts and over-smoothed predictions while improving conditional semantic alignment. Furthermore, to overcome architectural bottlenecks, we introduce the Impulse-Trend Synergistic Attention (ITSA) module. Grounded in the key insight of decoupling"what moves"from"when it moves,"ITSA models sharp, speech-driven rhythmic impulses separately from continuous kinematic trends, supporting precise audio-motion synchronization and global structural stability. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate that SynerGest achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering contextually responsive and kinematically fluid dyadic interactions.