Call for participation: GENEA Challenge 2023 on speech-driven gesture generation
Starting date: May 1

Location: Official Grand Challenge of ICMI 2023, Paris, France

Website: https://genea-workshop.github.io/2023/challenge/
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Overview
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The state of the art in co-speech gesture generation is difficult to assess, since every research group tends to use their own data, embodiment, and evaluation methodology. To better understand and compare methods for gesture generation and evaluation, we are continuing the GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Challenge, wherein different gesture-generation approaches are evaluated side by side in a large user study. This 2023 challenge is a Grand Challenge for ICMI 2023 and is a follow-up to the first and second editions of the GENEA Challenge, arranged in 2020 and 2022.

This year the challenge will focus on gesture synthesis in a dyadic setting, i.e., gestures that depend not only on speech, but also on the behaviour of an interlocutor in a conversation. We invite researchers in academia and industry working on any form of corpus-based non-verbal behaviour generation and gesticulation to submit entries to the challenge, whether their method is driven by rule or machine learning. Participants are provided a large, common dataset of speech (audio+aligned text transcriptions) and 3D motion to develop their systems, and then use these systems to generate motion on given test inputs. The generated motion clips are rendered onto a common virtual agent and evaluated for aspects such as motion quality and appropriateness in a large-scale crowdsourced user study.

Data

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The 2023 challenge is based on the Talking With Hands 16.2M dataset (https://github.com/facebookresearch/TalkingWithHands32M). The official challenge dataset also includes additional annotations, and is only available to registered participants.

Timeline

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April 1  – Participant registration opens

May 1 – Challenge training dataset released to participants

June 7 – Test input released to participants

June 14 – Deadline for participants to submit generated motion

July 3 – Release of crowdsourced evaluation results to participants

July 14 – Paper submission deadline

August 4 – Author notification

August 11 – Camera-ready papers due

October 9 or 13 – Challenge presentations at ICMI

If you would like to receive a notification when challenge registration opens, please follow this link: https://forms.gle/MFEXv84xGL3NrY3d9/.

Challenge paper

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Challenge participants are required to submit a paper that describes their system and findings, and will present their work at the Grand Challenge session at ICMI. All accepted papers will be part of the ACM ICMI 2023 main proceedings. Papers that are not accepted will have a chance to be considered for the GENEA Workshop 2023, whose papers are published in the ACM ICMI 2023 companion proceedings.