CustomListener: Text-guided Responsive Interaction for User-friendly Listening Head Generation
Authors: Xi Liu, Ying Guo, Cheng Zhen, Tong Li, Yingying Ao, Pengfei Yan

Listening head generation aims to synthesize a non-verbal responsive listener head by modeling the correlation between the speaker and the listener in dynamic conversion. The applications of listener agent generation in virtual interaction have promoted many works achieving diverse and fine-grained motion generation. However they can only manipulate motions through simple emotional labels but cannot freely control the listener's motions. Since listener agents should have human-like attributes (e.g. identity personality) which can be freely customized by users this limits their realism. In this paper we propose a user-friendly framework called CustomListener to realize the free-form text prior guided listener generation. To achieve speaker-listener coordination we design a Static to Dynamic Portrait module (SDP) which interacts with speaker information to transform static text into dynamic portrait token with completion rhythm and amplitude information. To achieve coherence between segments we design a Past Guided Generation module (PGG) to maintain the consistency of customized listener attributes through the motion prior and utilize a diffusion-based structure conditioned on the portrait token and the motion prior to realize the controllable generation. To train and evaluate our model we have constructed two text-annotated listening head datasets based on ViCo and RealTalk which provide text-video paired labels. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our model.