  This work targets a novel text-driven whole-body motion generation task,
which takes a given textual description as input and aims at generating
high-quality, diverse, and coherent facial expressions, hand gestures, and body
motions simultaneously. Previous works on text-driven motion generation tasks
mainly have two limitations: they ignore the key role of fine-grained hand and
face controlling in vivid whole-body motion generation, and lack a good
alignment between text and motion. To address such limitations, we propose a
Text-aligned whOle-body Motion generATiOn framework, named HumanTOMATO, which
is the first attempt to our knowledge towards applicable holistic motion
generation in this research area. To tackle this challenging task, our solution
includes two key designs: (1) a Holistic Hierarchical VQ-VAE (aka H$^2$VQ) and
a Hierarchical-GPT for fine-grained body and hand motion reconstruction and
generation with two structured codebooks; and (2) a pre-trained
text-motion-alignment model to help generated motion align with the input
textual description explicitly. Comprehensive experiments verify that our model
has significant advantages in both the quality of generated motions and their
alignment with text.
