Interactive Conversational Head Generation
This work addresses the need for synthesizing interlocutors in face-to-face conversations for applications like digital humans and virtual agents, though it is incremental as it builds on existing talking head generation by adding interaction components.
The authors tackled the problem of generating interactive conversational heads for digital humans by constructing two datasets (ViCo and ViCo-X) and defining three novel tasks for responsive listening, expressive talking, and integrated conversational head generation, with baseline methods showing the ability to generate vivid agents that collaborate with real persons in conversations.
We introduce a new conversation head generation benchmark for synthesizing behaviors of a single interlocutor in a face-to-face conversation. The capability to automatically synthesize interlocutors which can participate in long and multi-turn conversations is vital and offer benefits for various applications, including digital humans, virtual agents, and social robots. While existing research primarily focuses on talking head generation (one-way interaction), hindering the ability to create a digital human for conversation (two-way) interaction due to the absence of listening and interaction parts. In this work, we construct two datasets to address this issue, ``ViCo'' for independent talking and listening head generation tasks at the sentence level, and ``ViCo-X'', for synthesizing interlocutors in multi-turn conversational scenarios. Based on ViCo and ViCo-X, we define three novel tasks targeting the interaction modeling during the face-to-face conversation: 1) responsive listening head generation making listeners respond actively to the speaker with non-verbal signals, 2) expressive talking head generation guiding speakers to be aware of listeners' behaviors, and 3) conversational head generation to integrate the talking/listening ability in one interlocutor. Along with the datasets, we also propose corresponding baseline solutions to the three aforementioned tasks. Experimental results show that our baseline method could generate responsive and vivid agents that can collaborate with real person to fulfil the whole conversation. Project page: https://vico.solutions/.