Audio-Driven Facial Animation

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Overview

Audio-driven facial animation studies how speech can produce synchronized mouth movements and broader facial behavior in talking-head videos, 3D meshes, blendshapes, and Gaussian avatars. Systems use acoustic and phonetic features, often alongside text, emotion, identity, or conversational context, with Transformer, diffusion, and flow-matching models to generate motion or video. Current work aims to balance precise lip articulation with natural expression, identity preservation, personalization, and real-time or long-form generation. Evaluation remains an open challenge because frame-based metrics can miss timing differences, coarticulation, and whether motion looks natural to people.

Latest papers

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84 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 10% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Apr 28, 2026

Personalized Cross-Modal Emotional Correlation Learning for Speech-Preserving Facial Expression Manipulation

Speech-preserving facial expression manipulation (SPFEM) aims to enhance human expressiveness without altering mouth movements tied to the original speech. A primary challenge in this domain is the scarcity of paired data, namely aligned frames of the same individual with identical speech but different expressions, which impedes direct supervision for emotional manipulation. While current Visual-Language Models (VLMs) can extract aligned visual and semantic features, making them a promising source of supervision, their direct application is limited. To this end, we propose a Personalized Cross-Modal Emotional Correlation Learning (PCMECL) algorithm that refines VLM-based supervision through two major improvements. First, standard VLMs rely on a single generic prompt for each emotion, failing to capture expressive variations among individuals. PCMECL addresses this limitation by conditioning on individual visual information to learn personalized prompts, thereby establishing more fine-grained visual-semantic correlations. Second, even with personalization, inherent discrepancies persist between the visual and semantic feature distributions. To bridge this modality gap, PCMECL employs feature differencing to correlate the modalities, providing more precisely aligned supervision by matching the change in visual features to the change in semantic features. As a plug-and-play module, PCMECL can be seamlessly integrated into existing SPFEM models. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superior efficacy of our algorithm.

Tianshui Chen, Yujie Zhu, Jianman Lin +4

Guangdong University of Technology · South China University of Technology · Peking University +1

Prompt LearningVLM AdaptationCross-Modal AlignmentAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Apr 26, 2026

Personalizing Causal Audio-Driven Facial Motion via Dynamic Multi-modal Retrieval

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.

Xuangeng Chu, Yu Han, Wei Mao +1

The University of Tokyo, Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, USA · Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, USA · Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Audio-Driven Facial Animation
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Apr 25, 2026

EAD-Net: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Generation with Spatial Refinement and Temporal Coherence

Emotionally talking head video generation aims to generate expressive portrait videos with accurate lip synchronization and emotional facial expressions. Current methods rely on simple emotional labels, leading to insufficient semantic information. While introducing high-level semantics enhances expressiveness, it easily causes lip-sync degradation. Furthermore, mainstream generation methods struggle to balance computational efficiency and global motion awareness in long videos and suffer from poor temporal coherence. Therefore, we propose an Emotion-Aware Diffusion model-based Network, called EAD-Net. We introduce SyncNet supervision and Temporal Representation Alignment (TREPA) to mitigate lip-sync degradation caused by multi-modal fusion. To model complex spatio-temporal dependencies in long video sequences, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Directional Attention (STDA) mechanism that captures global motion patterns through strip attention. Additionally, we design a Temporal Frame graph Reasoning Module (TFRM) to explicitly model temporal coherence between video frames through graph structure learning. To enhance emotional semantic control, a large language model is employed to extract textual descriptions from real videos, serving as high-level semantic guidance. Experiments on the HDTF and MEAD datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of lip-sync accuracy, temporal consistency, and emotional accuracy.

Yahui Li, Yinfeng Yu, Liejun Wang +1

School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University Urumqi, China

Video Diffusion ModelsLip SynchronizationAudio-Visual SynchronizationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationVideo GenerationTemporal Consistency in Video Generation
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Apr 17, 2026

Polyglot: Multilingual Style Preserving Speech-Driven Facial Animation

Speech-Driven Facial Animation (SDFA) has gained significant attention due to its applications in movies, video games, and virtual reality. However, most existing models are trained on single-language data, limiting their effectiveness in real-world multilingual scenarios. In this work, we address multilingual SDFA, which is essential for realistic generation since language influences phonetics, rhythm, intonation, and facial expressions. Speaking style is also shaped by individual differences, not only by language. Existing methods typically rely on either language-specific or speaker-specific conditioning, but not both, limiting their ability to model their interaction. We introduce Polyglot, a unified diffusion-based architecture for personalized multilingual SDFA. Our method uses transcript embeddings to encode language information and style embeddings extracted from reference facial sequences to capture individual speaking characteristics. Polyglot does not require predefined language or speaker labels, enabling generalization across languages and speakers through self-supervised learning. By jointly conditioning on language and style, it captures expressive traits such as rhythm, articulation, and habitual facial movements, producing temporally coherent and realistic animations. Experiments show improved performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings, providing a unified framework for modeling language and personal style in SDFA.

Federico Nocentini, Kwanggyoon Seo, Qingju Liu +6

University of Florence · Flawless AI · Imperial College London

Audio-Driven Facial Animation
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Apr 14, 2026

SEDTalker: Emotion-Aware 3D Facial Animation Using Frame-Level Speech Emotion Diarization

We introduce SEDTalker, an emotion-aware framework for speech-driven 3D facial animation that leverages frame-level speech emotion diarization to achieve fine-grained expressive control. Unlike prior approaches that rely on utterance-level or manually specified emotion labels, our method predicts temporally dense emotion categories and intensities directly from speech, enabling continuous modulation of facial expressions over time. The diarized emotion signals are encoded as learned embeddings and used to condition a speech-driven 3D animation model based on a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture. This design allows effective disentanglement of linguistic content and emotional style while preserving identity and temporal coherence. We evaluate our approach on a large-scale multi-corpus dataset for speech emotion diarization and on the EmoVOCA dataset for emotional 3D facial animation. Quantitative results demonstrate strong frame-level emotion recognition performance and low geometric and temporal reconstruction errors, while qualitative results show smooth emotion transitions and consistent expression control. These findings highlight the effectiveness of frame-level emotion diarization for expressive and controllable 3D talking head generation.

Farzaneh Jafari, Stefano Berretti, Anup Basu

University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada · University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Audio-Driven Facial AnimationTalking Head GenerationFacial Expression SynthesisSpeech Emotion Recognition
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Apr 9, 2026

SyncBreaker:Stage-Aware Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation

Diffusion-based audio-driven talking-head generation enables realistic portrait animation, but also introduces risks of misuse, such as fraud and misinformation. Existing protection methods are largely limited to a single modality, and neither image-only nor audio-only attacks can effectively suppress speech-driven facial dynamics. To address this gap, we propose SyncBreaker, a stage-aware multimodal protection framework that jointly perturbs portrait and audio inputs under modality-specific perceptual constraints. Our key contributions are twofold. First, for the image stream, we introduce nullifying supervision with Multi-Interval Sampling (MIS) across diffusion stages to steer the generation toward the static reference portrait by aggregating guidance from multiple denoising intervals. Second, for the audio stream, we propose Cross-Attention Fooling (CAF), which suppresses interval-specific audio-conditioned cross-attention responses. Both streams are optimized independently and combined at inference time to enable flexible deployment. We evaluate SyncBreaker in a white-box proactive protection setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncBreaker more effectively degrades lip synchronization and facial dynamics than strong single-modality baselines, while preserving input perceptual quality and remaining robust under purification. Code: https://github.com/kitty384/SyncBreaker.

Wenli Zhang, Xianglong Shi, Sirui Zhao +5

Adversarial AttacksAudio-Driven Facial AnimationVideo Diffusion Models
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Apr 9, 2026

Cross-Modal Emotion Transfer for Emotion Editing in Talking Face Video

Talking face generation has gained significant attention as a core application of generative models. To enhance the expressiveness and realism of synthesized videos, emotion editing in talking face video plays a crucial role. However, existing approaches often limit expressive flexibility and struggle to generate extended emotions. Label-based methods represent emotions with discrete categories, which fail to capture a wide range of emotions. Audio-based methods can leverage emotionally rich speech signals - and even benefit from expressive text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis - but they fail to express the target emotions because emotions and linguistic contents are entangled in emotional speeches. Images-based methods, on the other hand, rely on target reference images to guide emotion transfer, yet they require high-quality frontal views and face challenges in acquiring reference data for extended emotions (e.g., sarcasm). To address these limitations, we propose Cross-Modal Emotion Transfer (C-MET), a novel approach that generates facial expressions based on speeches by modeling emotion semantic vectors between speech and visual feature spaces. C-MET leverages a large-scale pretrained audio encoder and a disentangled facial expression encoder to learn emotion semantic vectors that represent the difference between two different emotional embeddings across modalities. Extensive experiments on the MEAD and CREMA-D datasets demonstrate that our method improves emotion accuracy by 14% over state-of-the-art methods, while generating expressive talking face videos - even for unseen extended emotions. Code, checkpoint, and demo are available at https://chanhyeok-choi.github.io/C-MET/

Chanhyuk Choi, Taesoo Kim, Donggyu Lee +2

Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, Republic of Korea

Audio-Driven Facial AnimationControllable Video Generation
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Apr 3, 2026

MMTalker: Multiresolution 3D Talking Head Synthesis with Multimodal Feature Fusion

Speech-driven three-dimensional (3D) facial animation synthesis aims to build a mapping from one-dimensional (1D) speech signals to time-varying 3D facial motion signals. Current methods still face challenges in maintaining lip-sync accuracy and producing realistic facial expressions, primarily due to the highly ill-posed nature of this cross-modal mapping. In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D audio-driven facial animation synthesis method through multi-resolution representation and multi-modal feature fusion, called MMTalker which can accurately reconstruct the rich details of 3D facial motion. We first achieve the continuous representation of 3D face with details by mesh parameterization and non-uniform differentiable sampling. The mesh parameterization technique establishes the correspondence between UV plane and 3D facial mesh and is used to offer ground truth for the continuous learning. Differentiable non-uniform sampling enables precise facial detail acquisition by setting learnable sampling probability in each triangular face. Next, we employ residual graph convolutional network and dual cross-attention mechanism to extract discriminative facial motion feature from multiple input modalities. This proposed multimodal fusion strategy takes full use of the hierarchical features of speech and the explicit spatiotemporal geometric features of facial mesh. Finally, a lightweight regression network predicts the vertex-wise geometric displacements of the synthesized talking face by jointly processing the sampled points in the canonical UV space and the encoded facial motion features. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that significant improvements are achieved over state-of-the-art methods, especially in the synchronization accuracy of lip and eye movements.

Bin Liu, Zhixiang Xiong, Zhifen He +1

Talking Head GenerationAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Apr 2, 2026

Realistic Lip Motion Generation Based on 3D Dynamic Viseme and Coarticulation Modeling for Human-Robot Interaction

Realistic lip synchronization is essential for the natural human-robot non-verbal interaction of humanoid robots. Motivated by this need, this paper presents a lip motion generation framework based on 3D dynamic viseme and coarticulation modeling. By analyzing Chinese pronunciation theory, a 3D dynamic viseme library is constructed based on the ARKit standard, which offers coherent prior trajectories of lips. To resolve motion conflicts within continuous speech streams, a coarticulation mechanism is developed by incorporating initial-final (Shengmu-Yunmu) decoupling and energy modulation. After developing a strategy to retarget high-dimensional spatial lip motion to a 14-DOF lip actuation system of a humanoid head platform, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed architecture is experimentally validated and demonstrated with quantitative ablation experiments using the metrics of the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) and the Mean Absolute Jerk (MAJ). This research offers a lightweight, efficient, and highly practical paradigm for the speech-driven lip motion generation of humanoid robots. The 3D dynamic viseme library and real-world deployment videos are available at {https://github.com/yuesheng21/Phoneme-to-Lip-14DOF}

Sheng Li, Jingcheng Huang, Min Li

The authors are with The State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.

Lip SynchronizationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationHuman-Robot Interaction
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Mar 22, 2026

EmoTaG: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Synthesis on Gaussian Splatting with Few-Shot Personalization

Audio-driven 3D talking head synthesis has advanced rapidly with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). By leveraging rich pre-trained priors, few-shot methods enable instant personalization from just a few seconds of video. However, under expressive facial motion, existing few-shot approaches often suffer from geometric instability and audio-emotion mismatch, highlighting the need for more effective emotion-aware motion modeling. In this work, we present EmoTaG, a few-shot emotion-aware 3D talking head synthesis framework built on the Pretrain-and-Adapt paradigm. Our key insight is to reformulate motion prediction in a structured FLAME parameter space rather than directly deforming 3D Gaussians, thereby introducing explicit geometric priors that improve motion stability. Building upon this, we propose a Gated Residual Motion Network (GRMN), which captures emotional prosody from audio while supplementing head pose and upper-face cues absent from audio, enabling expressive and coherent motion generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoTaG achieves state-of-the-art performance in emotional expressiveness, lip synchronization, visual realism, and motion stability.

Haolan Xu, Keli Cheng, Lei Wang +2

Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 · Qualcomm Technologies Inc., San Diego, CA 92121 · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Talking Head GenerationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationFacial Expression Synthesis3D Gaussian Splatting
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Mar 18, 2026

ECHO: Towards Emotionally Appropriate and Contextually Aware Interactive Head Generation

In natural face-to-face interaction, participants seamlessly alternate between speaking and listening, producing facial behaviors (FBs) that are finely informed by long-range context and naturally exhibit contextual appropriateness and emotional rationality. Interactive Head Generation (IHG) aims to synthesize lifelike avatar head video emulating such capabilities. Existing IHG methods typically condition on dual-track signals (i.e., human user's behaviors and pre-defined audio for avatar) within a short temporal window, jointly driving generation of avatar's audio-aligned lip articulation and non-verbal FBs. However, two main challenges persist in these methods: (i) the reliance on short-clip behavioral cues without long-range contextual modeling leads them to produce facial behaviors lacking contextual appropriateness; and (ii) the entangled, role-agnostic fusion of dual-track signals empirically introduces cross-signal interference, potentially compromising lip-region synchronization during speaking. To this end, we propose ECHO, a novel IHG framework comprising two key components: a Long-range Contextual Understanding (LCU) component that facilitates contextual understanding of both behavior-grounded dynamics and linguistic-driven affective semantics to promote contextual appropriateness and emotional rationality of synthesized avatar FBs; and a block-wise Spatial-aware Decoupled Cross-attention Modulation (SDCM) module, that preserves self-audio-driven lip articulation while adaptively integrating user contextual behavioral cues for non-lip facial regions, complemented by our designed two-stage training paradigm, to jointly enhance lip synchronization and visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed components and ECHO's superior IHG performance.

Xiangyu Kong, Xiaoyu Jin, Yihan Pan +6

University of Exeter, Exeter, UK · Meituan, China · College of Computer Science, Nankai University, China +1

Talking Head GenerationHuman Avatar AnimationAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Mar 16, 2026

FreeTalk: Emotional Topology-Free 3D Talking Heads

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has advanced rapidly, yet most approaches remain tied to registered template meshes, preventing effective deployment on raw 3D scans with arbitrary topology. At the same time, modeling controllable emotional dynamics beyond lip articulation remains challenging, and is often tied to template-based parameterizations. We address these challenges by proposing FreeTalk, a two-stage framework for emotion-conditioned 3D talking-head animation that generalizes to unregistered face meshes with arbitrary vertex count and connectivity. First, Audio-To-Sparse (ATS) predicts a temporally coherent sequence of 3D landmark displacements from speech audio, conditioned on an emotion category and intensity. This sparse representation captures both articulatory and affective motion while remaining independent of mesh topology. Second, Sparse-To-Mesh (STM) transfers the predicted landmark motion to a target mesh by combining intrinsic surface features with landmark-to-vertex conditioning, producing dense per-vertex deformations without template fitting or correspondence supervision at test time. Extensive experiments show that FreeTalk matches specialized baselines when trained in-domain, while providing substantially improved robustness to unseen identities and mesh topologies. Code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.

Federico Nocentini, Thomas Besnier, Claudio Ferrari +2

Media Integration and Communication Center (MICC), University of Florence, Italy · University of Copenhagen · IMT Nord Europe, Institut Mines-Télécom, Centre for Digital Systems +1

3D Mesh DeformationAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Mar 16, 2026

Face-to-Face: A Video Dataset for Multi-Person Interaction Modeling

Modeling the reactive tempo of human conversation remains difficult because most audio-visual datasets portray isolated speakers delivering short monologues. We introduce Face-to-Face with Jimmy Fallon (F2F-JF), a 70-hour, 14k-clip dataset of two-person talk-show exchanges that preserves the sequential dependency between a guest turn and the host's response. A semi-automatic pipeline combines multi-person tracking, speech diarization, and lightweight human verification to extract temporally aligned host/guest tracks with tight crops and metadata that are ready for downstream modeling. We showcase the dataset with a reactive, speech-driven digital avatar task in which the host video during [t1,t2][t_1,t_2] is generated from their audio plus the guest's preceding video during [t0,t1][t_0,t_1]. Conditioning a MultiTalk-style diffusion model on this cross-person visual context yields small but consistent Emotion-FID and FVD gains while preserving lip-sync quality relative to an audio-only baseline. The dataset, preprocessing recipe, and baseline together provide an end-to-end blueprint for studying dyadic, sequential behavior, which we expand upon throughout the paper. Dataset and code are available at https://face2face2026.github.io.

Ernie Chu, Vishal M. Patel

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD 21218, USA

Talking Head GenerationAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Mar 10, 2026

SyncEdit: Rethinking Lip Synchronization as Editing with Audio-Driven Diffusion Models

Lip synchronization refers to the task of modifying facial lip movements such that they are temporally aligned with a given audio signal. It is a fundamental problem in audio-visual synthesis for generating realistic talking-head videos. Recent progress in diffusion-based generative models has led to remarkable advances in lip synchronization. Nevertheless, existing methods typically achieve audio-visual alignment by fine-tuning pre-trained diffusion models on large scale datasets, resulting in substantial computational costs and significant data requirements. Inspired by FlowEdit, we reformulate lip synchronization as a video editing problem. Building upon a pre-trained audio-driven diffusion model, our approach achieves lip synchronization in a training-free manner, without additional fine-tuning or paired data. In this paper, we present SyncEdit, a training-free framework designed for lip synchronization. We reformulate the editing paradigm by substituting the edit sequence in FlowEdit with the target sequence, yielding an unbiased estimation of the desired output. Moreover, we propose annealed noise alignment, which progressively alignes the sampled Gaussian noise with diffusion-model-estimated noise during iterative editing, producing a smooth and stable editing trajectory. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Code is available at \href[]{https://github.com/l1346792580123/SyncEdit}{here}.

Lixiang Lin, Siyuan Jin, Jinshan Zhang

HiThink Research · University of Science and Technology of China · Zhejiang University

Lip SynchronizationVideo EditingAudio-Visual SynchronizationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationDiffusion-Based Video Editing
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Mar 9, 2026

Talking Together: Synthesizing Co-Located 3D Conversations from Audio

We tackle the challenging task of generating complete 3D facial animations for two interacting, co-located participants from a mixed audio stream. While existing methods often produce disembodied "talking heads" akin to a video conference call, our work is the first to explicitly model the dynamic 3D spatial relationship -- including relative position, orientation, and mutual gaze -- that is crucial for realistic in-person dialogues. Our system synthesizes the full performance of both individuals, including precise lip-sync, and uniquely allows their relative head poses to be controlled via textual descriptions. To achieve this, we propose a dual-stream architecture where each stream is responsible for one participant's output. We employ speaker's role embeddings and inter-speaker cross-attention mechanisms designed to disentangle the mixed audio and model the interaction. Furthermore, we introduce a novel eye gaze loss to promote natural, mutual eye contact. To power our data-hungry approach, we introduce a novel pipeline to curate a large-scale conversational dataset consisting of over 2 million dyadic pairs from in-the-wild videos. Our method generates fluid, controllable, and spatially aware dyadic animations suitable for immersive applications in VR and telepresence, significantly outperforming existing baselines in perceived realism and interaction coherence.

Mengyi Shan, Shouchieh Chang, Ziqian Bai +6

University of Washington · Google · University of Rochester

Human Avatar AnimationAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Mar 8, 2026

EmbedTalk: Talking Head Synthesis using Gaussian Embeddings

Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a popular method for real-time talking head synthesis, offering high-quality renderings at low latency. Tri-planes are a common choice for encoding Gaussians prior to deformation since they provide a compact and continuous representation. However, tri-plane encodings are limited by grid resolution and approximation errors introduced by projecting 3D volumetric fields onto 2D subspaces. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of per-Gaussian embeddings for driving temporal deformations in 4D scene reconstruction. We introduce EmbedTalk, which leverages these embeddings to model speech-driven facial deformations for talking head synthesis. Comprehensive experiments show that EmbedTalk improves rendering quality, lip synchronisation, and motion consistency over previous 3DGS-based methods, while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art generative models. Replacing tri-plane features with embeddings also yields significantly more compact models that achieve 60+ FPS on a laptop GPU (RTX 2060 6 GB). Our code will be placed in the public domain on acceptance.

Arpita Saggar, Jonathan C. Darling, Duygu Sarikaya +1

School of Computer Science, University of Leeds · Leeds Institute of Medical Education, School of Medicine, University of Leeds

3D Gaussian SplattingLip SynchronizationTalking Head GenerationAudio-Visual SynchronizationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationVideo Generation
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Mar 4, 2026

UniSync: Towards Generalizable and High-Fidelity Lip Synchronization for Challenging Scenarios

Lip synchronization aims to generate realistic talking videos that match given audio, which is essential for high-quality video dubbing. However, current methods have fundamental drawbacks: mask-based approaches suffer from local color discrepancies, while mask-free methods struggle with global background texture misalignment. Furthermore, most methods struggle with diverse real-world scenarios such as stylized avatars, face occlusion, and extreme lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose UniSync, a unified framework designed for achieving high-fidelity lip synchronization in diverse scenarios. Specifically, UniSync uses a mask-free pose-anchored training strategy to keep head motion and eliminate synthesis color artifacts, while employing mask-based blending consistent inference to ensure structural precision and smooth blending. Notably, fine-tuning on compact but diverse videos empowers our model with exceptional domain adaptability, handling complex corner cases effectively. We also introduce the RealWorld-LipSync benchmark to evaluate models under real-world demands, which covers diverse application scenarios including both human faces and stylized avatars. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSync significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, advancing the field towards truly generalizable and production-ready lip synchronization.

Ruidi Fan, Yang Zhou, Siyuan Wang +3

Mango TV

Lip SynchronizationAudio-Visual SynchronizationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationDomain Generalization
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Mar 2, 2026

UniTalking: A Unified Audio-Video Framework for Talking Portrait Generation

While state-of-the-art audio-video generation models like Veo3 and Sora2 demonstrate remarkable capabilities, their closed-source nature makes their architectures and training paradigms inaccessible. To bridge this gap in accessibility and performance, we introduce UniTalking, a unified, end-to-end diffusion framework for generating high-fidelity speech and lip-synchronized video. At its core, our framework employs Multi-Modal Transformer Blocks to explicitly model the fine-grained temporal correspondence between audio and video latent tokens via a shared self-attention mechanism. By leveraging powerful priors from a pre-trained video generation model, our framework ensures state-of-the-art visual fidelity while enabling efficient training. Furthermore, UniTalking incorporates a personalized voice cloning capability, allowing the generation of speech in a target style from a brief audio reference. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method produces highly realistic talking portraits, achieving superior performance over existing open-source approaches in lip-sync accuracy, audio naturalness, and overall perceptual quality.

Hebeizi Li, Zihao Liang, Benyuan Sun +4

Central Media Technology Institute, Huawei · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University

Lip SynchronizationAudio-Video GenerationTalking Head GenerationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationAudio-Visual SynchronizationVideo Diffusion Models
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Feb 25, 2026

FlowPortrait: Reinforcement Learning for Audio-Driven Portrait Video Generation

Generating realistic talking-head videos remains challenging due to persistent issues such as imperfect lip synchronization, unnatural motion, and evaluation metrics that correlate poorly with human perception. We propose FlowPortrait, a reinforcement-learning framework for audio-driven portrait animation built on a multimodal backbone for autoregressive audio-to-video generation. FlowPortrait introduces a human-aligned evaluation system based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to assess lip-sync accuracy, expressiveness, and motion quality. These signals are combined with perceptual and temporal consistency regularizers to form a stable composite reward, which is used to post-train the generator via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments, including both automatic evaluations and human preference studies, demonstrate that FlowPortrait consistently produces higher-quality talking-head videos, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforcement learning for portrait animation.

Weiting Tan, Andy T. Liu, Ming Tu +3

ByteDance Seed · Johns Hopkins University

Audio-Driven Facial AnimationAudio-Video GenerationRL for Video GenerationAutoregressive Video GenerationVideo Generation Evaluation
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Feb 20, 2026

Narrating For You: Prompt-guided Audio-visual Narrating Face Generation Employing Multi-entangled Latent Space

We present a novel approach for generating realistic speaking and talking faces by synthesizing a person's voice and facial movements from a static image, a voice profile, and a target text. The model encodes the prompt/driving text, the driving image, and the voice profile of an individual and then combines them to pass them to the multi-entangled latent space to foster key-value pairs and queries for the audio and video modality generation pipeline. The multi-entangled latent space is responsible for establishing the spatiotemporal person-specific features between the modalities. Further, entangled features are passed to the respective decoder of each modality for output audio and video generation.

Aashish Chandra, Aashutosh A, Abhijit Das

Machine Intelligence Group, Department of CS&IS, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, India · Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Audio-Video GenerationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationControllable Speech GenerationConditional Generative Modeling
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Feb 17, 2026

UniTAF: A Modular Framework for Joint Text-to-Speech and Audio-to-Face Modeling

This work considers merging two independent models, TTS and A2F, into a unified model to enable internal feature transfer, thereby improving the consistency between audio and facial expressions generated from text. We also discuss the extension of the emotion control mechanism from TTS to the joint model. This work does not aim to showcase generation quality; instead, from a system design perspective, it validates the feasibility of reusing intermediate representations from TTS for joint modeling of speech and facial expressions, and provides engineering practice references for subsequent speech expression co-design. The project code has been open source at: https://github.com/GoldenFishes/UniTAF

Qiangong Zhou, Nagasaka Tomohiro

Sumeru AI Technology Co., Ltd.

Unified Multimodal ModelsAudio-Video GenerationFacial Expression SynthesisAudio-Driven Facial Animation
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Feb 11, 2026

3DXTalker: Unifying Identity, Lip Sync, Emotion, and Spatial Dynamics in Expressive 3D Talking Avatars

Audio-driven 3D talking avatar generation is increasingly important in virtual communication, digital humans, and interactive media, where avatars must preserve identity, synchronize lip motion with speech, express emotion, and exhibit lifelike spatial dynamics, collectively defining a broader objective of expressivity. However, achieving this remains challenging due to insufficient training data with limited subject identities, narrow audio representations, and restricted explicit controllability. In this paper, we propose 3DXTalker, an expressive 3D talking avatar through data-curated identity modeling, audio-rich representations, and spatial dynamics controllability. 3DXTalker enables scalable identity modeling via 2D-to-3D data curation pipeline and disentangled representations, alleviating data scarcity and improving identity generalization. Then, we introduce frame-wise amplitude and emotional cues beyond standard speech embeddings, ensuring superior lip synchronization and nuanced expression modulation. These cues are unified by a flow-matching-based transformer for coherent facial dynamics. Moreover, 3DXTalker also enables natural head-pose motion generation while supporting stylized control via prompt-based conditioning. Extensive experiments show that 3DXTalker integrates lip synchronization, emotional expression, and head-pose dynamics within a unified framework, achieves superior performance in 3D talking avatar generation.

Zhongju Wang, Zhenhong Sun, Beier Wang +4

University of New South Wales · Australian National University · Vertex Lab +1

Lip Synchronization3D Avatar GenerationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationHuman Avatar AnimationAudio-Visual SynchronizationHuman Motion Generation
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Feb 6, 2026

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely underexplored. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), a framework that augments OLLMs with speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a speech-unit generator with blendshape co-supervision and a non-autoregressive blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) interface for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a 1.2M-sample weakly supervised dataset for speech-accompanied facial animation. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni retains competitive speech QA capability while natively generating coordinated text, speech, and 3D facial animation, and approaches the Audio2Face-3D teacher cascade in synchronization and human preference.

Haoyu Zhang, Zhipeng Li, Yiwen Guo +1

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · LIGHTSPEED · Independent Researcher

Multimodal Large Language ModelsAudio-Driven Facial AnimationMultimodal GenerationFacial Expression Synthesis
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Aug 30, 2023

From Pixels to Portraits: A Comprehensive Survey of Talking Head Generation Techniques and Applications

Talking head generation has progressed rapidly from landmark- and GAN-based facial animation to diffusion models, neural rendering, 3D-aware avatars, and foundation-model-assisted systems. This progress has enabled increasingly realistic audio-, image-, and video-driven talking heads, but it has also made the field difficult to navigate because methods differ substantially in their inputs, assumptions, controllability, temporal stability, computational cost, and risks of misuse. This survey provides a critical review of talking head generation techniques, organizing the literature into four broad families: image-driven, audio-driven, video-driven, and 3D/neural-rendering-based approaches. For each family, we discuss the underlying technical ideas, representative methods, strengths, limitations, datasets, and evaluation practices. Beyond cataloguing prior work, we analyse the persistent gap between commonly reported quantitative metrics and perceptual quality, and compare publicly available models in terms of inference time, memory requirements, and human-rated visual quality. We also examine emerging trends, including diffusion-based generation, 3D-aware representation learning, controllable emotional expression, real-time deployment, and the growing importance of provenance, watermarking, and deepfake detection. Finally, we identify open challenges around robust evaluation, identity preservation, lip synchronisation, temporal consistency, demographic fairness, computational efficiency, and responsible use. This review aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a structured and up-to-date map of the talking head generation landscape, while highlighting the technical and societal questions that should shape future work.

Shreyank N Gowda, Dheeraj Pandey, Shashank Narayana Gowda

School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom · Independent Researcher

Audio-Video GenerationTalking Head GenerationAudio-Driven Facial AnimationVideo Generation
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