ECHO: Dyadic 3D Facial Motion Generation with Asymmetric Deterministic Articulation and Stochastic Reaction

RESUMO

We propose ECHO for dyadic 3D facial motion generation under a strict dual-stream audio-only setting, formulating the problem as an asymmetric task involving speech-constrained articulation and one-to-many listener reactions. To address this asymmetry, ECHO decomposes motion into a deterministic anchor that captures stable speech-correlated structure and a stochastic residual that models the remaining one-to-many interaction dynamics. On top of this backbone, Motion Memory acts as a training-only regularizer during brief late-stage fine-tuning to provide local priors for weakly conditioned listening windows, while semantic-group scaling controls residual injection across expression, jaw, and neck. This design balances speaking-side articulatory fidelity with listening-side realism and diversity in a single generation process. Results from unified, state-wise, and ablation evaluations show that conversational 3D motion benefits from decomposing stable and uncertain components rather than applying stochasticity uniformly. ECHO provides a practical formulation and technical basis for deployable conversational digital humans under strict audio-only conditions.