EmpaAva: An Open-source Agentic 3D-Avatar Empathetic Live Chatbot

Abstract:This paper presents EmpaAva, to our knowledge the first open-source, agentic 3D-avatar empathetic chatbot, which carries empathetic response generation (ERG) from text-only exchanges into live, face-to-face interaction. Through a video-call-like interface, a user speaks to a 3D digital human that reads their affect from speech and optional vision, and replies with emotional speech, lip-synced facial motion, and photorealistic 3D Gaussian rendering. At its core, an LLM coordinates a Tri-Agent Architecture, in which perception, empathetic response planning, and embodied rendering form a closed loop, paired with a Response Planning layer that compiles each reply into an executable multimodal plan, keeping voice, expression, and rendering on one empathetic intent. Building on strong open-source modules, EmpaAva supplies the intelligence that binds them into one controllable, inspectable experience. In automatic and human evaluations, EmpaAva surpasses text-only, 2D talking-face, and multimodal avatar baselines in emotion understanding, response quality, and audio-visual consistency. We open-source EmpaAva with an online live demo.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.04709 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.04709v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04709 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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