Audio-to-motion generation is an important task with applications in virtual avatar creation for XR systems and intelligent robot control in daily life scenarios.
Most current motion generation methods depend on a single encoder-decoder architecture to simultaneously model all body parts, constraining their capacity to capture the diverse and complex motions exhibited by humans.
In this paper, we propose a novel method, SpeechCAT, that employs three separate encoder-decoder modules to individually model the motions of the face, body, and hands. To capture the relationships and synchronization among these body parts, we introduce a cross-attention mechanism to effectively learn their correlations.
SpeechCAT ensures sufficient capacity to model the unique characteristics of each body part while preserving the coherence between them.
Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of SpeechCAT over baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness in generating diverse, realistic, and synchronized motions with face, body, and hand parts.

This paper analyzes how flocking behavior in fish can be used to develop target protection algorithms. This starts from the hypothesis that fish aggregate into coordinated flocks in order to protect themselves from predatory attacks. In order to test the protection capabilities of fish, a Prey-Predator instance is developed in which faults are introduced. Prey fish try to protect their faulty flock-mates and themselves from predatory attacks while Predators hunt the fish in order to stay alive. The simulated fish are developed using Boids that emerge in a 70 prey versus 7 predators ecosystem [4]. Results are then extracted using multiple attacking and protection strategies as well as different faulty Boid configurations.
The results initially show no improvement when flocking around faulty prey but when a genetic approach is introduced, the prey gains a clear advantage against the predators. This implies that fish flocking (as opposed to individualistic behavior) is an optimal protection strategy against attacks and could be used in other instances such as military operations or agriculture automation.