Organizations: The University of Tokyo, Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, USA · Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, USA · Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Abstract
Audio-driven facial animation is essential for immersive digital interaction, yet existing frameworks fail to reconcile real-time streaming with high-fidelity personalization. Current methods often rely on latency-inducing audio look-ahead, or require high user compliance to pre-encode static embeddings that fails to capture dynamic idiosyncrasies. We present an end-to-end causal framework for personalizing causal facial motion generation via dynamic multi-modal style retrieval, enabling ultra-low latency while uniquely leveraging unstructured style references. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a temporal hierarchical motion representation that captures global temporal context and high-frequency details while maintaining decoding causality, and (2) a multi-modal style retriever that jointly queries audio and motion to dynamically extract stylistic priors without breaking causality. This mechanism allows for scalable personalization with total flexibility regarding the number and contents of templates. By integrating these components into a causal autoregressive architecture, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in lip-sync accuracy, identity consistency, and perceived realism, supported by extensive quantitative evaluations and user studies.
Speech-driven facial animation requires accurate correspondence between acoustic signals and facial motion, especially for articulation-related mouth movements. However, directly mapping speech audio to facial coefficients often overlooks the linguistic and phonetic structure underlying speech production. In this paper, we propose AudioFace, a language-assisted framework for speech-driven blendshape generation that treats mouth-related facial coefficient prediction as a structured generation problem guided by linguistic and articulatory information. Instead of relying solely on acoustic features, our method leverages the prior knowledge of multimodal large language models and introduces transcript- and phoneme-level cues to bridge speech signals with interpretable facial actions. Extensive experiments show that AudioFace achieves superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics, validating the effectiveness of language-assisted and multimodal-prior-guided speech-driven facial animation.
Audio-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate synchronized lip movements and vivid facial expressions from arbitrary audio clips. While existing methods can produce synchronized lip motions, they often rely on predefined identity or style latent features, which limits users' ability to freely control speaking styles. Moreover, applying a fixed style or identity to an entire audio segment typically results in facial animation styles that do not adapt to the emotional content of the audio. To address these challenges, we revisit the entanglement between style and emotion, construct a large-scale dataset with textual descriptions of both style and emotion, and propose a novel talking head generation framework that enables separate control over style and emotion. Our model takes as input both textual descriptions of speaking style and character emotion, as well as the driving audio stream, enabling real-time generation of highly synchronized lip movements and facial expressions that match the provided descriptions. Furthermore, our model supports dynamic emotion control during inference, allowing it to handle scenarios where the target emotion changes throughout the speech.
Audio-driven human motion video generation aims to synthesize realistic and temporally coherent human animations from a single static image, with applications in talking-head synthesis, co-speech gesture generation, and dynamic presentations. Moving beyond conventional keypoint-based methods that often struggle to capture subtle motion dynamics, We propose a novel implicit-motion framework for generating realistic and temporally coherent human motion videos from a single static image and audio. Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline that decouples motion prediction from rendering. The first stage integrates appearance priors and hierarchical depth cues into a region-aware attention mechanism to model latent motion features. The second stage employs a Mamba-enhanced diffusion model to directly predict these features from audio and the source image, enabling unsupervised learning of fine-grained motion patterns. This decoupled architecture enhances flexibility and efficiency. Trained on a new 380-hour high-quality dataset, our method outperforms prior work across multiple public benchmarks and our collected data in accuracy, naturalness, and temporal coherence, setting a new state-of-the-art.