Daily Papers

Enabling virtual humans to dynamically and realistically respond to diverse auditory stimuli remains a key challenge in character animation, demanding the integration of perceptual modeling and motion synthesis. Despite its significance, this task remains largely unexplored. Most previous works have primarily focused on mapping modalities like speech, audio, and music to generate human motion. As of yet, these models typically overlook the impact of spatial features encoded in spatial audio signals on human motion. To bridge this gap and enable high-quality modeling of human movements in response to spatial audio, we introduce the first comprehensive Spatial Audio-Driven Human Motion (SAM) dataset, which contains diverse and high-quality spatial audio and motion data. For benchmarking, we develop a simple yet effective diffusion-based generative framework for human MOtion generation driven by SPatial Audio, termed MOSPA, which faithfully captures the relationship between body motion and spatial audio through an effective fusion mechanism. Once trained, MOSPA could generate diverse realistic human motions conditioned on varying spatial audio inputs. We perform a thorough investigation of the proposed dataset and conduct extensive experiments for benchmarking, where our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on this task. Our model and dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance. Please refer to our supplementary video for more details.

This study delves into the intricacies of synchronizing facial dynamics with multilingual audio inputs, focusing on the creation of visually compelling, time-synchronized animations through diffusion-based techniques. Diverging from traditional parametric models for facial animation, our approach, termed LinguaLinker, adopts a holistic diffusion-based framework that integrates audio-driven visual synthesis to enhance the synergy between auditory stimuli and visual responses. We process audio features separately and derive the corresponding control gates, which implicitly govern the movements in the mouth, eyes, and head, irrespective of the portrait's origin. The advanced audio-driven visual synthesis mechanism provides nuanced control but keeps the compatibility of output video and input audio, allowing for a more tailored and effective portrayal of distinct personas across different languages. The significant improvements in the fidelity of animated portraits, the accuracy of lip-syncing, and the appropriate motion variations achieved by our method render it a versatile tool for animating any portrait in any language.

This work has been carried out to improve the dearth of high-quality EEG datasets used for schizophrenia diagnostic tools development and studies from populations of developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. To this aim, the presented dataset contains international 10/20 system EEG recordings from West African subjects of Nigerian origin in restful states, mental arithmetic task execution states and while passively reacting to auditory stimuli, the first of its kind from the region and continent. The subjects are divided into patients and healthy controls and recorded from 37 patients and 22 healthy control subjects identified by the Mini International Schizophrenia Interview (MINI) and also assessed by the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) and the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS). All patients are admitted schizophrenia patients of the Mental Health Ward, Medical Outpatient Department of the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital Complex (OAUTHC, Ile-Ife) and its subsidiary Wesley Guild Hospital Unit (OAUTHC, Ilesa). Controls are drawn from students and clinicians who volunteered to participate in the study at the Mental Health Ward of OAUTHC and the Wesley Guild Hospital Unit. This dataset is the first version of the Nigerian schizophrenia dataset (NSzED) and can be used by the neuroscience and computational psychiatry research community studying the diagnosis and prognosis of schizophrenia using the electroencephalogram signal modality.