Be Persuasive! Automatic Transformation of Virtual Agent's Head and Facial Behavior

Afef Cherni, Roxane Bertrand, Magalie Ochs

2024

Abstract

The persuasiveness of a virtual agent refers to its ability to influence, persuade, or motivate users to take specific actions or adopt certain attitudes or beliefs. Virtual agents can use its multimodal capabilities, including non-verbal cues to enhance their persuasiveness. In this paper, we present a new tool called THRUST (from neuTral Human face to peRsUaSive virTual face) to automatically generate the head movements and facial expressions of a persuasive virtual character. This tool is based on a machine learning approach from a human videos corpus to identify the non-verbal persuasive cues. A convolution-based model then transforms neutral non-verbal behavior to a persuasive non-verbal behavior simulated on a virtual face. Videos generated by the tool have been evaluated through a subjective perceptive study with about 90 participants. The results show that the virtual agent’s head and facial behaviors generated by the THRUST tool are perceived as persuasive, thus validating the proposed approach.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Cherni A., Bertrand R. and Ochs M. (2024). Be Persuasive! Automatic Transformation of Virtual Agent's Head and Facial Behavior. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART; ISBN 978-989-758-680-4, SciTePress, pages 359-366. DOI: 10.5220/0012429700003636

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart24,
author={Afef Cherni and Roxane Bertrand and Magalie Ochs},
title={Be Persuasive! Automatic Transformation of Virtual Agent's Head and Facial Behavior},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART},
year={2024},
pages={359-366},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012429700003636},
isbn={978-989-758-680-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART
TI - Be Persuasive! Automatic Transformation of Virtual Agent's Head and Facial Behavior
SN - 978-989-758-680-4
AU - Cherni A.
AU - Bertrand R.
AU - Ochs M.
PY - 2024
SP - 359
EP - 366
DO - 10.5220/0012429700003636
PB - SciTePress