cs.CVOct 13, 2026

Kandinsky S2V 1.0: Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation

Authors: Nikolay Semenov, Artem Riabinin, Sergey Bassenko, Anna Averchenkova, Julia Agafonova, Anastasia Aliaskina, Kirill Kozlov, Lev Novitskiy, 

Organizations: Kandinsky Lab

Abstract

We present Kandinsky S2V 1.0, an open family of speech-to-video models for controllable audio-driven human animation, comprising Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Lite (2B parameters) and Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro (21B parameters). From a single reference image, a speech waveform, and a text prompt, the models generate long-form 25 FPS video in which lip motion, expression, pose, and gesture follow the speech. The architecture draws text and audio conditioning from one Qwen2.5-Omni model and adds a reference-aware three-scale visual memory. Training starts from the Kandinsky 5.0 Video foundation models [1] and combines mixed reference-memory layouts with an area-adaptive face loss. The training corpus contains 1.17M single-speaker clips selected by active-speaker detection, with captions generated directly in English and Russian. A side-by-side human evaluation against the strongest open-source baseline and two proprietary commercial models shows that Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro performs comparably to or better than these models on average and is also preferred for lip synchronization. On common speech to video benchmarks, Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Lite and Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro rank among the top performing models according to mean rank over five reported metrics. Beyond the base models, we provide π-Flow distilled variants of both Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Lite and Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro. The distilled Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro model generates video in 16 sampling steps without classifier-free guidance, achieving a 5.4 times end-to-end speedup over the base model, while matching or exceeding it on nearly all reported benchmark metrics. To accelerate open research and deployment in speech-to-video generation, we release the code, model checkpoints, and diffusers integration under the MIT license.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Oct 4, 2026

Kandinsky 6.0 Video: Foundation Models for Synchronized Video and Audio Generation

We present Kandinsky 6.0 Video, a family of foundation diffusion models for synchronized text-to-audio-video generation, comprising Kandinsky 6.0 Video Lite (3B parameters) and Kandinsky 6.0 Video Pro (29B parameters). Both models generate 5-second video clips with synchronized 44 kHz audio, including lip-sync, in text-to-audio-video (T2AV) and image-to-audio-video (I2AV) modes; a built-in super-resolution model raises the output resolution to Full-HD (1920×\times1080). Building on the video generation capabilities of Kandinsky 5.0, Kandinsky 6.0 Video employs a dual-stream CrossDiT architecture that connects a pretrained video stream and a newly trained audio stream through bidirectional cross-attention for temporal and semantic alignment. Our continuous pretraining strategy first trains the audio stream from scratch on large-scale audio corpora and then trains both streams jointly on paired audio-video data while preserving unimodal fidelity; pretraining is followed by supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement-learning-based post-training, and distillation. In side-by-side human evaluation, Kandinsky 6.0 Video Pro clearly outperforms its predecessor, Kandinsky 5.0 Video Pro, and remains competitive with leading audio-video generation models, particularly in speech quality. To accelerate open research and deployment in multimedia generation, we release the code, model checkpoints, and diffusers integration under the MIT license.
Mar 23, 2026

Speed by Simplicity: A Single-Stream Architecture for Fast Audio-Video Generative Foundation Model

We present daVinci-MagiHuman, an open-source audio-video generative foundation model for human-centric generation. daVinci-MagiHuman jointly generates synchronized video and audio using a single-stream Transformer that processes text, video, and audio within a unified token sequence via self-attention only. This single-stream design avoids the complexity of multi-stream or cross-attention architectures while remaining easy to optimize with standard training and inference infrastructure. The model is particularly strong in human-centric scenarios, producing expressive facial performance, natural speech-expression coordination, realistic body motion, and precise audio-video synchronization. It supports multilingual spoken generation across Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), English, Japanese, Korean, German, and French. For efficient inference, we combine the single-stream backbone with model distillation, latent-space super-resolution, and a Turbo VAE decoder, enabling generation of a 5-second 256p video in 2 seconds on a single H100 GPU. In automatic evaluation, daVinci-MagiHuman achieves the highest visual quality and text alignment among leading open models, along with the lowest word error rate (14.60%) for speech intelligibility. In pairwise human evaluation, it achieves win rates of 80.0% against Ovi 1.1 and 60.9% against LTX 2.3 over 2000 comparisons. We open-source the complete model stack, including the base model, the distilled model, the super-resolution model, and the inference codebase.
Jun 11, 2026

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.