Co-Speech with You: Training-Free Personalization of Robot Co-Speech Gestures

Abstract:Personal robots should adapt their co-speech gesture style to a new user without requiring model retraining. We present a training-free personalization pipeline that combines a frozen audio-conditioned diffusion prior with a gesture style encoder and lightweight conditioning adapters. The encoder is first trained to discriminate speaker identities and then jointly refined with the adapters using the diffusion objective, enabling a reusable style embedding to be extracted from approximately 10 seconds of enrollment motion through a single forward pass. To support this setting, we also release a Quest~3 capture application and a dataset of spontaneous co-speech motion from ten participants. We evaluate the system on held-out speakers using Style Recognition Accuracy (SRA) and Fr'echet Gesture Distance (FGD) to measure personalization and motion quality. Our approach improves SRA from 27.6\% for the frozen prior to 69.5\% while preserving motion quality (FGD 34.2 versus 34.8), and replacing the enrollment embedding with another person's reduces SRA to 11.4\%. The generated gestures are retargeted to a physical NAO robot, and this improvement also transfers to the robot deployment setting, where speech is synthesized using five TTS voices, retaining 67.3\% SRA.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.13876 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.13876v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.13876 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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