Daily Papers

Audio-driven talking head synthesis has achieved remarkable photorealism, yet state-of-the-art (SOTA) models exhibit a critical failure: they lack generalization to the full spectrum of human diversity in ethnicity, language, and age groups. We argue that this generalization gap is a direct symptom of limitations in existing training data, which lack the necessary scale, quality, and diversity. To address this challenge, we introduce TalkVid, a new large-scale, high-quality, and diverse dataset containing 1244 hours of video from 7729 unique speakers. TalkVid is curated through a principled, multi-stage automated pipeline that rigorously filters for motion stability, aesthetic quality, and facial detail, and is validated against human judgments to ensure its reliability. Furthermore, we construct and release TalkVid-Bench, a stratified evaluation set of 500 clips meticulously balanced across key demographic and linguistic axes. Our experiments demonstrate that a model trained on TalkVid outperforms counterparts trained on previous datasets, exhibiting superior cross-dataset generalization. Crucially, our analysis on TalkVid-Bench reveals performance disparities across subgroups that are obscured by traditional aggregate metrics, underscoring its necessity for future research. Code and data can be found in https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/TalkVid

Audio-driven talking head generation has drawn much attention in recent years, and many efforts have been made in lip-sync, expressive facial expressions, natural head pose generation, and high video quality. However, no model has yet led or tied on all these metrics due to the one-to-many mapping between audio and motion. In this paper, we propose VividTalk, a two-stage generic framework that supports generating high-visual quality talking head videos with all the above properties. Specifically, in the first stage, we map the audio to mesh by learning two motions, including non-rigid expression motion and rigid head motion. For expression motion, both blendshape and vertex are adopted as the intermediate representation to maximize the representation ability of the model. For natural head motion, a novel learnable head pose codebook with a two-phase training mechanism is proposed. In the second stage, we proposed a dual branch motion-vae and a generator to transform the meshes into dense motion and synthesize high-quality video frame-by-frame. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VividTalk can generate high-visual quality talking head videos with lip-sync and realistic enhanced by a large margin, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art works in objective and subjective comparisons.

Audio-driven talking-head synthesis is a popular research topic for virtual human-related applications. However, the inflexibility and inefficiency of existing methods, which necessitate expensive end-to-end training to transfer emotions from guidance videos to talking-head predictions, are significant limitations. In this work, we propose the Emotional Adaptation for Audio-driven Talking-head (EAT) method, which transforms emotion-agnostic talking-head models into emotion-controllable ones in a cost-effective and efficient manner through parameter-efficient adaptations. Our approach utilizes a pretrained emotion-agnostic talking-head transformer and introduces three lightweight adaptations (the Deep Emotional Prompts, Emotional Deformation Network, and Emotional Adaptation Module) from different perspectives to enable precise and realistic emotion controls. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely-used benchmarks, including LRW and MEAD. Additionally, our parameter-efficient adaptations exhibit remarkable generalization ability, even in scenarios where emotional training videos are scarce or nonexistent. Project website: https://yuangan.github.io/eat/

The existing methods for audio-driven talking head video editing have the limitations of poor visual effects. This paper tries to tackle this problem through editing talking face images seamless with different emotions based on two modules: (1) an audio-to-landmark module, consisting of the CrossReconstructed Emotion Disentanglement and an alignment network module. It bridges the gap between speech and facial motions by predicting corresponding emotional landmarks from speech; (2) a landmark-based editing module edits face videos via StyleGAN. It aims to generate the seamless edited video consisting of the emotion and content components from the input audio. Extensive experiments confirm that compared with state-of-the-arts methods, our method provides high-resolution videos with high visual quality.

This paper presents EGSTalker, a real-time audio-driven talking head generation framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Designed to enhance both speed and visual fidelity, EGSTalker requires only 3-5 minutes of training video to synthesize high-quality facial animations. The framework comprises two key stages: static Gaussian initialization and audio-driven deformation. In the first stage, a multi-resolution hash triplane and a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) are used to extract spatial features and construct a compact 3D Gaussian representation. In the second stage, we propose an Efficient Spatial-Audio Attention (ESAA) module to fuse audio and spatial cues, while KAN predicts the corresponding Gaussian deformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGSTalker achieves rendering quality and lip-sync accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while significantly outperforming them in inference speed. These results highlight EGSTalker's potential for real-time multimedia applications.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in talking head generation, owing to its potential to revolutionize the human-AI interaction from text interfaces into realistic video chats. However, research on text-driven talking heads remains underexplored, with existing methods predominantly adopting a cascaded pipeline that combines TTS systems with audio-driven talking head models. This conventional pipeline not only introduces system complexity and latency overhead but also fundamentally suffers from asynchronous audiovisual output and stylistic discrepancies between generated speech and visual expressions. To address these limitations, we introduce OmniTalker, an end-to-end unified framework that simultaneously generates synchronized speech and talking head videos from text and reference video in real-time zero-shot scenarios, while preserving both speech style and facial styles. The framework employs a dual-branch diffusion transformer architecture: the audio branch synthesizes mel-spectrograms from text, while the visual branch predicts fine-grained head poses and facial dynamics. To bridge modalities, we introduce a novel audio-visual fusion module that integrates cross-modal information to ensure temporal synchronization and stylistic coherence between audio and visual outputs. Furthermore, our in-context reference learning module effectively captures both speech and facial style characteristics from a single reference video without introducing an extra style extracting module. To the best of our knowledge, OmniTalker presents the first unified framework that jointly models speech style and facial style in a zero-shot setting, achieving real-time inference speed of 25 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in generation quality, particularly excelling in style preservation and audio-video synchronization.

While previous audio-driven talking head generation (THG) methods generate head poses from driving audio, the generated poses or lips cannot match the audio well or are not editable. In this study, we propose PoseTalk, a THG system that can freely generate lip-synchronized talking head videos with free head poses conditioned on text prompts and audio. The core insight of our method is using head pose to connect visual, linguistic, and audio signals. First, we propose to generate poses from both audio and text prompts, where the audio offers short-term variations and rhythm correspondence of the head movements and the text prompts describe the long-term semantics of head motions. To achieve this goal, we devise a Pose Latent Diffusion (PLD) model to generate motion latent from text prompts and audio cues in a pose latent space. Second, we observe a loss-imbalance problem: the loss for the lip region contributes less than 4\% of the total reconstruction loss caused by both pose and lip, making optimization lean towards head movements rather than lip shapes. To address this issue, we propose a refinement-based learning strategy to synthesize natural talking videos using two cascaded networks, i.e., CoarseNet, and RefineNet. The CoarseNet estimates coarse motions to produce animated images in novel poses and the RefineNet focuses on learning finer lip motions by progressively estimating lip motions from low-to-high resolutions, yielding improved lip-synchronization performance. Experiments demonstrate our pose prediction strategy achieves better pose diversity and realness compared to text-only or audio-only, and our video generator model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing talking videos with natural head motions. Project: https://junleen.github.io/projects/posetalk.

In this paper, we introduce a simple and novel framework for one-shot audio-driven talking head generation. Unlike prior works that require additional driving sources for controlled synthesis in a deterministic manner, we instead probabilistically sample all the holistic lip-irrelevant facial motions (i.e. pose, expression, blink, gaze, etc.) to semantically match the input audio while still maintaining both the photo-realism of audio-lip synchronization and the overall naturalness. This is achieved by our newly proposed audio-to-visual diffusion prior trained on top of the mapping between audio and disentangled non-lip facial representations. Thanks to the probabilistic nature of the diffusion prior, one big advantage of our framework is it can synthesize diverse facial motion sequences given the same audio clip, which is quite user-friendly for many real applications. Through comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks, we conclude that (1) our diffusion prior outperforms auto-regressive prior significantly on almost all the concerned metrics; (2) our overall system is competitive with prior works in terms of audio-lip synchronization but can effectively sample rich and natural-looking lip-irrelevant facial motions while still semantically harmonized with the audio input.

In this paper, we propose a novel audio-driven talking head method capable of simultaneously generating highly expressive facial expressions and hand gestures. Unlike existing methods that focus on generating full-body or half-body poses, we investigate the challenges of co-speech gesture generation and identify the weak correspondence between audio features and full-body gestures as a key limitation. To address this, we redefine the task as a two-stage process. In the first stage, we generate hand poses directly from audio input, leveraging the strong correlation between audio signals and hand movements. In the second stage, we employ a diffusion model to synthesize video frames, incorporating the hand poses generated in the first stage to produce realistic facial expressions and body movements. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, such as CyberHost and Vlogger, in terms of both visual quality and synchronization accuracy. This work provides a new perspective on audio-driven gesture generation and a robust framework for creating expressive and natural talking head animations.

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized audio-driven talking head synthesis. Beyond precise lip synchronization, diffusion-based methods excel in generating subtle expressions and natural head movements that are well-aligned with the audio signal. However, these methods are confronted by slow inference speed, insufficient fine-grained control over facial motions, and occasional visual artifacts largely due to an implicit latent space derived from Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), which prevent their adoption in realtime interaction applications. To address these issues, we introduce Ditto, a diffusion-based framework that enables controllable realtime talking head synthesis. Our key innovation lies in bridging motion generation and photorealistic neural rendering through an explicit identity-agnostic motion space, replacing conventional VAE representations. This design substantially reduces the complexity of diffusion learning while enabling precise control over the synthesized talking heads. We further propose an inference strategy that jointly optimizes three key components: audio feature extraction, motion generation, and video synthesis. This optimization enables streaming processing, realtime inference, and low first-frame delay, which are the functionalities crucial for interactive applications such as AI assistants. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Ditto generates compelling talking head videos and substantially outperforms existing methods in both motion control and realtime performance.

Achieving disentangled control over multiple facial motions and accommodating diverse input modalities greatly enhances the application and entertainment of the talking head generation. This necessitates a deep exploration of the decoupling space for facial features, ensuring that they a) operate independently without mutual interference and b) can be preserved to share with different modal input, both aspects often neglected in existing methods. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel Efficient Disentanglement framework for Talking head generation (EDTalk). Our framework enables individual manipulation of mouth shape, head pose, and emotional expression, conditioned on video or audio inputs. Specifically, we employ three lightweight modules to decompose the facial dynamics into three distinct latent spaces representing mouth, pose, and expression, respectively. Each space is characterized by a set of learnable bases whose linear combinations define specific motions. To ensure independence and accelerate training, we enforce orthogonality among bases and devise an efficient training strategy to allocate motion responsibilities to each space without relying on external knowledge. The learned bases are then stored in corresponding banks, enabling shared visual priors with audio input. Furthermore, considering the properties of each space, we propose an Audio-to-Motion module for audio-driven talking head synthesis. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of EDTalk. We recommend watching the project website: https://tanshuai0219.github.io/EDTalk/

High-fidelity and efficient audio-driven talking head generation has been a key research topic in computer graphics and computer vision. In this work, we study vector image based audio-driven talking head generation. Compared with directly animating the raster image that most widely used in existing works, vector image enjoys its excellent scalability being used for many applications. There are two main challenges for vector image based talking head generation: the high-quality vector image reconstruction w.r.t. the source portrait image and the vivid animation w.r.t. the audio signal. To address these, we propose a novel scalable vector graphic reconstruction and animation method, dubbed VectorTalker. Specifically, for the highfidelity reconstruction, VectorTalker hierarchically reconstructs the vector image in a coarse-to-fine manner. For the vivid audio-driven facial animation, we propose to use facial landmarks as intermediate motion representation and propose an efficient landmark-driven vector image deformation module. Our approach can handle various styles of portrait images within a unified framework, including Japanese manga, cartoon, and photorealistic images. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of VectorTalker in both vector graphic reconstruction and audio-driven animation.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in audio-driven talking head generation. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on single-character scenarios. While some methods can create separate conversation videos between two individuals, the critical challenge of generating unified conversation videos with multiple physically co-present characters sharing the same spatial environment remains largely unaddressed. This setting presents two key challenges: audio-to-character correspondence control and the lack of suitable datasets featuring multi-character talking videos within the same scene. To address these challenges, we introduce Bind-Your-Avatar, an MM-DiT-based model specifically designed for multi-talking-character video generation in the same scene. Specifically, we propose (1) A novel framework incorporating a fine-grained Embedding Router that binds `who' and `speak what' together to address the audio-to-character correspondence control. (2) Two methods for implementing a 3D-mask embedding router that enables frame-wise, fine-grained control of individual characters, with distinct loss functions based on observed geometric priors and a mask refinement strategy to enhance the accuracy and temporal smoothness of the predicted masks. (3) The first dataset, to the best of our knowledge, specifically constructed for multi-talking-character video generation, and accompanied by an open-source data processing pipeline, and (4) A benchmark for the dual-talking-characters video generation, with extensive experiments demonstrating superior performance over multiple state-of-the-art methods.

2D portrait animation has experienced significant advancements in recent years. Much research has utilized the prior knowledge embedded in large generative diffusion models to enhance high-quality image manipulation. However, most methods only focus on generating RGB images as output, and the co-generation of consistent visual plus 3D output remains largely under-explored. In our work, we propose to jointly learn the visual appearance and depth simultaneously in a diffusion-based portrait image generator. Our method embraces the end-to-end diffusion paradigm and introduces a new architecture suitable for learning this conditional joint distribution, consisting of a reference network and a channel-expanded diffusion backbone. Once trained, our framework can be efficiently adapted to various downstream applications, such as facial depth-to-image and image-to-depth generation, portrait relighting, and audio-driven talking head animation with consistent 3D output.

Audio-driven video portrait synthesis is a crucial and useful technology in virtual human interaction and film-making applications. Recent advancements have focused on improving the image fidelity and lip-synchronization. However, generating accurate emotional expressions is an important aspect of realistic talking-head generation, which has remained underexplored in previous works. We present a novel system in this paper for synthesizing high-fidelity, audio-driven video portraits with accurate emotional expressions. Specifically, we utilize a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based audio-to-motion module to generate facial landmarks. These landmarks are concatenated with emotional embeddings to produce emotional landmarks through our motion-to-emotion module. These emotional landmarks are then used to render realistic emotional talking-head video using a Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based emotion-to-video module. Additionally, we propose a pose sampling method that generates natural idle-state (non-speaking) videos in response to silent audio inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method obtains more accurate emotion generation with higher fidelity.

Generating talking head videos through a face image and a piece of speech audio still contains many challenges. ie, unnatural head movement, distorted expression, and identity modification. We argue that these issues are mainly because of learning from the coupled 2D motion fields. On the other hand, explicitly using 3D information also suffers problems of stiff expression and incoherent video. We present SadTalker, which generates 3D motion coefficients (head pose, expression) of the 3DMM from audio and implicitly modulates a novel 3D-aware face render for talking head generation. To learn the realistic motion coefficients, we explicitly model the connections between audio and different types of motion coefficients individually. Precisely, we present ExpNet to learn the accurate facial expression from audio by distilling both coefficients and 3D-rendered faces. As for the head pose, we design PoseVAE via a conditional VAE to synthesize head motion in different styles. Finally, the generated 3D motion coefficients are mapped to the unsupervised 3D keypoints space of the proposed face render, and synthesize the final video. We conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of motion and video quality.

We introduce VASA, a framework for generating lifelike talking faces with appealing visual affective skills (VAS) given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only producing lip movements that are exquisitely synchronized with the audio, but also capturing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness. The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512x512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.

Diffusion-based video generation techniques have significantly improved zero-shot talking-head avatar generation, enhancing the naturalness of both head motion and facial expressions. However, existing methods suffer from poor controllability, making them less applicable to real-world scenarios such as filmmaking and live streaming for e-commerce. To address this limitation, we propose FLAP, a novel approach that integrates explicit 3D intermediate parameters (head poses and facial expressions) into the diffusion model for end-to-end generation of realistic portrait videos. The proposed architecture allows the model to generate vivid portrait videos from audio while simultaneously incorporating additional control signals, such as head rotation angles and eye-blinking frequency. Furthermore, the decoupling of head pose and facial expression allows for independent control of each, offering precise manipulation of both the avatar's pose and facial expressions. We also demonstrate its flexibility in integrating with existing 3D head generation methods, bridging the gap between 3D model-based approaches and end-to-end diffusion techniques. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms recent audio-driven portrait video models in both naturalness and controllability.

We present VideoReTalking, a new system to edit the faces of a real-world talking head video according to input audio, producing a high-quality and lip-syncing output video even with a different emotion. Our system disentangles this objective into three sequential tasks: (1) face video generation with a canonical expression; (2) audio-driven lip-sync; and (3) face enhancement for improving photo-realism. Given a talking-head video, we first modify the expression of each frame according to the same expression template using the expression editing network, resulting in a video with the canonical expression. This video, together with the given audio, is then fed into the lip-sync network to generate a lip-syncing video. Finally, we improve the photo-realism of the synthesized faces through an identity-aware face enhancement network and post-processing. We use learning-based approaches for all three steps and all our modules can be tackled in a sequential pipeline without any user intervention. Furthermore, our system is a generic approach that does not need to be retrained to a specific person. Evaluations on two widely-used datasets and in-the-wild examples demonstrate the superiority of our framework over other state-of-the-art methods in terms of lip-sync accuracy and visual quality.

Audio-driven single-image talking portrait generation plays a crucial role in virtual reality, digital human creation, and filmmaking. Existing approaches are generally categorized into keypoint-based and image-based methods. Keypoint-based methods effectively preserve character identity but struggle to capture fine facial details due to the fixed points limitation of the 3D Morphable Model. Moreover, traditional generative networks face challenges in establishing causality between audio and keypoints on limited datasets, resulting in low pose diversity. In contrast, image-based approaches produce high-quality portraits with diverse details using the diffusion network but incur identity distortion and expensive computational costs. In this work, we propose KDTalker, the first framework to combine unsupervised implicit 3D keypoint with a spatiotemporal diffusion model. Leveraging unsupervised implicit 3D keypoints, KDTalker adapts facial information densities, allowing the diffusion process to model diverse head poses and capture fine facial details flexibly. The custom-designed spatiotemporal attention mechanism ensures accurate lip synchronization, producing temporally consistent, high-quality animations while enhancing computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that KDTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance regarding lip synchronization accuracy, head pose diversity, and execution efficiency.Our codes are available at https://github.com/chaolongy/KDTalker.

Audio-driven portrait animation aims to synthesize realistic and natural talking head videos from an input audio signal and a single reference image. While existing methods achieve high-quality results by leveraging high-dimensional intermediate representations and explicitly modeling motion dynamics, their computational complexity renders them unsuitable for real-time deployment. Real-time inference imposes stringent latency and memory constraints, often necessitating the use of highly compressed latent representations. However, operating in such compact spaces hinders the preservation of fine-grained spatiotemporal details, thereby complicating audio-visual synchronization RAP (Real-time Audio-driven Portrait animation), a unified framework for generating high-quality talking portraits under real-time constraints. Specifically, RAP introduces a hybrid attention mechanism for fine-grained audio control, and a static-dynamic training-inference paradigm that avoids explicit motion supervision. Through these techniques, RAP achieves precise audio-driven control, mitigates long-term temporal drift, and maintains high visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAP achieves state-of-the-art performance while operating under real-time constraints.

Audio-driven emotional 3D face animation aims to generate emotionally expressive talking heads with synchronized lip movements. However, previous research has often overlooked the influence of diverse emotions on facial expressions or proved unsuitable for driving MetaHuman models. In response to this deficiency, we introduce EmoFace, a novel audio-driven methodology for creating facial animations with vivid emotional dynamics. Our approach can generate facial expressions with multiple emotions, and has the ability to generate random yet natural blinks and eye movements, while maintaining accurate lip synchronization. We propose independent speech encoders and emotion encoders to learn the relationship between audio, emotion and corresponding facial controller rigs, and finally map into the sequence of controller values. Additionally, we introduce two post-processing techniques dedicated to enhancing the authenticity of the animation, particularly in blinks and eye movements. Furthermore, recognizing the scarcity of emotional audio-visual data suitable for MetaHuman model manipulation, we contribute an emotional audio-visual dataset and derive control parameters for each frames. Our proposed methodology can be applied in producing dialogues animations of non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games, and driving avatars in virtual reality environments. Our further quantitative and qualitative experiments, as well as an user study comparing with existing researches show that our approach demonstrates superior results in driving 3D facial models. The code and sample data are available at https://github.com/SJTU-Lucy/EmoFace.

Audio-driven human animation methods, such as talking head and talking body generation, have made remarkable progress in generating synchronized facial movements and appealing visual quality videos. However, existing methods primarily focus on single human animation and struggle with multi-stream audio inputs, facing incorrect binding problems between audio and persons. Additionally, they exhibit limitations in instruction-following capabilities. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel task: Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation, and introduce a new framework, MultiTalk, to address the challenges during multi-person generation. Specifically, for audio injection, we investigate several schemes and propose the Label Rotary Position Embedding (L-RoPE) method to resolve the audio and person binding problem. Furthermore, during training, we observe that partial parameter training and multi-task training are crucial for preserving the instruction-following ability of the base model. MultiTalk achieves superior performance compared to other methods on several datasets, including talking head, talking body, and multi-person datasets, demonstrating the powerful generation capabilities of our approach.

Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in a variety of downstream generative tasks, yet remain under-explored in the important and challenging expressive talking head generation. In this work, we propose a DreamTalk framework to fulfill this gap, which employs meticulous design to unlock the potential of diffusion models in generating expressive talking heads. Specifically, DreamTalk consists of three crucial components: a denoising network, a style-aware lip expert, and a style predictor. The diffusion-based denoising network is able to consistently synthesize high-quality audio-driven face motions across diverse expressions. To enhance the expressiveness and accuracy of lip motions, we introduce a style-aware lip expert that can guide lip-sync while being mindful of the speaking styles. To eliminate the need for expression reference video or text, an extra diffusion-based style predictor is utilized to predict the target expression directly from the audio. By this means, DreamTalk can harness powerful diffusion models to generate expressive faces effectively and reduce the reliance on expensive style references. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamTalk is capable of generating photo-realistic talking faces with diverse speaking styles and achieving accurate lip motions, surpassing existing state-of-the-art counterparts.

In this work, we introduce the first autoregressive framework for real-time, audio-driven portrait animation, a.k.a, talking head. Beyond the challenge of lengthy animation times, a critical challenge in realistic talking head generation lies in preserving the natural movement of diverse body parts. To this end, we propose Teller, the first streaming audio-driven protrait animation framework with autoregressive motion generation. Specifically, Teller first decomposes facial and body detail animation into two components: Facial Motion Latent Generation (FMLG) based on an autoregressive transfromer, and movement authenticity refinement using a Efficient Temporal Module (ETM).Concretely, FMLG employs a Residual VQ model to map the facial motion latent from the implicit keypoint-based model into discrete motion tokens, which are then temporally sliced with audio embeddings. This enables the AR tranformer to learn real-time, stream-based mappings from audio to motion. Furthermore, Teller incorporate ETM to capture finer motion details. This module ensures the physical consistency of body parts and accessories, such as neck muscles and earrings, improving the realism of these movements. Teller is designed to be efficient, surpassing the inference speed of diffusion-based models (Hallo 20.93s vs. Teller 0.92s for one second video generation), and achieves a real-time streaming performance of up to 25 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms recent audio-driven portrait animation models, especially in small movements, as validated by human evaluations with a significant margin in quality and realism.

Talking head generation intends to produce vivid and realistic talking head videos from a single portrait and speech audio clip. Although significant progress has been made in diffusion-based talking head generation, almost all methods rely on autoregressive strategies, which suffer from limited context utilization beyond the current generation step, error accumulation, and slower generation speed. To address these challenges, we present DAWN (Dynamic frame Avatar With Non-autoregressive diffusion), a framework that enables all-at-once generation of dynamic-length video sequences. Specifically, it consists of two main components: (1) audio-driven holistic facial dynamics generation in the latent motion space, and (2) audio-driven head pose and blink generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates authentic and vivid videos with precise lip motions, and natural pose/blink movements. Additionally, with a high generation speed, DAWN possesses strong extrapolation capabilities, ensuring the stable production of high-quality long videos. These results highlight the considerable promise and potential impact of DAWN in the field of talking head video generation. Furthermore, we hope that DAWN sparks further exploration of non-autoregressive approaches in diffusion models. Our code will be publicly at https://github.com/Hanbo-Cheng/DAWN-pytorch.

Singing, as a common facial movement second only to talking, can be regarded as a universal language across ethnicities and cultures, plays an important role in emotional communication, art, and entertainment. However, it is often overlooked in the field of audio-driven facial animation due to the lack of singing head datasets and the domain gap between singing and talking in rhythm and amplitude. To this end, we collect a high-quality large-scale singing head dataset, SingingHead, which consists of more than 27 hours of synchronized singing video, 3D facial motion, singing audio, and background music from 76 individuals and 8 types of music. Along with the SingingHead dataset, we benchmark existing audio-driven 3D facial animation methods and 2D talking head methods on the singing task. Furthermore, we argue that 3D and 2D facial animation tasks can be solved together, and propose a unified singing head animation framework named UniSinger to achieve both singing audio-driven 3D singing head animation and 2D singing portrait video synthesis, which achieves competitive results on both 3D and 2D benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the proposed singing-specific dataset in promoting the development of singing head animation tasks, as well as the promising performance of our unified facial animation framework.

The intrinsic link between facial motion and speech is often overlooked in generative modeling, where talking head synthesis and text-to-speech (TTS) are typically addressed as separate tasks. This paper introduces JAM-Flow, a unified framework to simultaneously synthesize and condition on both facial motion and speech. Our approach leverages flow matching and a novel Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) architecture, integrating specialized Motion-DiT and Audio-DiT modules. These are coupled via selective joint attention layers and incorporate key architectural choices, such as temporally aligned positional embeddings and localized joint attention masking, to enable effective cross-modal interaction while preserving modality-specific strengths. Trained with an inpainting-style objective, JAM-Flow supports a wide array of conditioning inputs-including text, reference audio, and reference motion-facilitating tasks such as synchronized talking head generation from text, audio-driven animation, and much more, within a single, coherent model. JAM-Flow significantly advances multi-modal generative modeling by providing a practical solution for holistic audio-visual synthesis. project page: https://joonghyuk.com/jamflow-web

We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting.

One-shot 3D talking portrait generation aims to reconstruct a 3D avatar from an unseen image, and then animate it with a reference video or audio to generate a talking portrait video. The existing methods fail to simultaneously achieve the goals of accurate 3D avatar reconstruction and stable talking face animation. Besides, while the existing works mainly focus on synthesizing the head part, it is also vital to generate natural torso and background segments to obtain a realistic talking portrait video. To address these limitations, we present Real3D-Potrait, a framework that (1) improves the one-shot 3D reconstruction power with a large image-to-plane model that distills 3D prior knowledge from a 3D face generative model; (2) facilitates accurate motion-conditioned animation with an efficient motion adapter; (3) synthesizes realistic video with natural torso movement and switchable background using a head-torso-background super-resolution model; and (4) supports one-shot audio-driven talking face generation with a generalizable audio-to-motion model. Extensive experiments show that Real3D-Portrait generalizes well to unseen identities and generates more realistic talking portrait videos compared to previous methods. Video samples and source code are available at https://real3dportrait.github.io .

We introduce FaceTalk, a novel generative approach designed for synthesizing high-fidelity 3D motion sequences of talking human heads from input audio signal. To capture the expressive, detailed nature of human heads, including hair, ears, and finer-scale eye movements, we propose to couple speech signal with the latent space of neural parametric head models to create high-fidelity, temporally coherent motion sequences. We propose a new latent diffusion model for this task, operating in the expression space of neural parametric head models, to synthesize audio-driven realistic head sequences. In the absence of a dataset with corresponding NPHM expressions to audio, we optimize for these correspondences to produce a dataset of temporally-optimized NPHM expressions fit to audio-video recordings of people talking. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a generative approach for realistic and high-quality motion synthesis of volumetric human heads, representing a significant advancement in the field of audio-driven 3D animation. Notably, our approach stands out in its ability to generate plausible motion sequences that can produce high-fidelity head animation coupled with the NPHM shape space. Our experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of FaceTalk, consistently achieving superior and visually natural motion, encompassing diverse facial expressions and styles, outperforming existing methods by 75% in perceptual user study evaluation.

Generating photo-realistic video portrait with arbitrary speech audio is a crucial problem in film-making and virtual reality. Recently, several works explore the usage of neural radiance field in this task to improve 3D realness and image fidelity. However, the generalizability of previous NeRF-based methods to out-of-domain audio is limited by the small scale of training data. In this work, we propose GeneFace, a generalized and high-fidelity NeRF-based talking face generation method, which can generate natural results corresponding to various out-of-domain audio. Specifically, we learn a variaitional motion generator on a large lip-reading corpus, and introduce a domain adaptative post-net to calibrate the result. Moreover, we learn a NeRF-based renderer conditioned on the predicted facial motion. A head-aware torso-NeRF is proposed to eliminate the head-torso separation problem. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves more generalized and high-fidelity talking face generation compared to previous methods.

The domain of 3D talking head generation has witnessed significant progress in recent years. A notable challenge in this field consists in blending speech-related motions with expression dynamics, which is primarily caused by the lack of comprehensive 3D datasets that combine diversity in spoken sentences with a variety of facial expressions. Whereas literature works attempted to exploit 2D video data and parametric 3D models as a workaround, these still show limitations when jointly modeling the two motions. In this work, we address this problem from a different perspective, and propose an innovative data-driven technique that we used for creating a synthetic dataset, called EmoVOCA, obtained by combining a collection of inexpressive 3D talking heads and a set of 3D expressive sequences. To demonstrate the advantages of this approach, and the quality of the dataset, we then designed and trained an emotional 3D talking head generator that accepts a 3D face, an audio file, an emotion label, and an intensity value as inputs, and learns to animate the audio-synchronized lip movements with expressive traits of the face. Comprehensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, using our data and generator evidence superior ability in synthesizing convincing animations, when compared with the best performing methods in the literature. Our code and pre-trained model will be made available.

Talking Head Generation (THG), typically driven by audio, is an important and challenging task with broad application prospects in various fields such as digital humans, film production, and virtual reality. While diffusion model-based THG methods present high quality and stable content generation, they often overlook the intrinsic style which encompasses personalized features such as speaking habits and facial expressions of a video. As consequence, the generated video content lacks diversity and vividness, thus being limited in real life scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework named Style-Enhanced Vivid Portrait (SVP) which fully leverages style-related information in THG. Specifically, we first introduce the novel probabilistic style prior learning to model the intrinsic style as a Gaussian distribution using facial expressions and audio embedding. The distribution is learned through the 'bespoked' contrastive objective, effectively capturing the dynamic style information in each video. Then we finetune a pretrained Stable Diffusion (SD) model to inject the learned intrinsic style as a controlling signal via cross attention. Experiments show that our model generates diverse, vivid, and high-quality videos with flexible control over intrinsic styles, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.

Talking head synthesis is vital for virtual avatars and human-computer interaction. However, most existing methods are typically limited to accepting control from a single primary modality, restricting their practical utility. To this end, we introduce ACTalker, an end-to-end video diffusion framework that supports both multi-signals control and single-signal control for talking head video generation. For multiple control, we design a parallel mamba structure with multiple branches, each utilizing a separate driving signal to control specific facial regions. A gate mechanism is applied across all branches, providing flexible control over video generation. To ensure natural coordination of the controlled video both temporally and spatially, we employ the mamba structure, which enables driving signals to manipulate feature tokens across both dimensions in each branch. Additionally, we introduce a mask-drop strategy that allows each driving signal to independently control its corresponding facial region within the mamba structure, preventing control conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces natural-looking facial videos driven by diverse signals and that the mamba layer seamlessly integrates multiple driving modalities without conflict.

The generation of emotional talking faces from a single portrait image remains a significant challenge. The simultaneous achievement of expressive emotional talking and accurate lip-sync is particularly difficult, as expressiveness is often compromised for the accuracy of lip-sync. As widely adopted by many prior works, the LSTM network often fails to capture the subtleties and variations of emotional expressions. To address these challenges, we introduce DREAM-Talk, a two-stage diffusion-based audio-driven framework, tailored for generating diverse expressions and accurate lip-sync concurrently. In the first stage, we propose EmoDiff, a novel diffusion module that generates diverse highly dynamic emotional expressions and head poses in accordance with the audio and the referenced emotion style. Given the strong correlation between lip motion and audio, we then refine the dynamics with enhanced lip-sync accuracy using audio features and emotion style. To this end, we deploy a video-to-video rendering module to transfer the expressions and lip motions from our proxy 3D avatar to an arbitrary portrait. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, DREAM-Talk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of expressiveness, lip-sync accuracy and perceptual quality.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has recently garnered attention due to its cost-effective usability in multimedia production. However, most current advances overlook the intelligibility of lip movements, limiting the realism of facial expressions. In this paper, we introduce a method for speech-driven 3D facial animation to generate accurate lip movements, proposing an audio-visual multimodal perceptual loss. This loss provides guidance to train the speech-driven 3D facial animators to generate plausible lip motions aligned with the spoken transcripts. Furthermore, to incorporate the proposed audio-visual perceptual loss, we devise an audio-visual lip reading expert leveraging its prior knowledge about correlations between speech and lip motions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through broad experiments, showing noticeable improvements in lip synchronization and lip readability performance. Codes are available at https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

Speech-driven facial animation is the process that automatically synthesizes talking characters based on speech signals. The majority of work in this domain creates a mapping from audio features to visual features. This approach often requires post-processing using computer graphics techniques to produce realistic albeit subject dependent results. We present an end-to-end system that generates videos of a talking head, using only a still image of a person and an audio clip containing speech, without relying on handcrafted intermediate features. Our method generates videos which have (a) lip movements that are in sync with the audio and (b) natural facial expressions such as blinks and eyebrow movements. Our temporal GAN uses 3 discriminators focused on achieving detailed frames, audio-visual synchronization, and realistic expressions. We quantify the contribution of each component in our model using an ablation study and we provide insights into the latent representation of the model. The generated videos are evaluated based on sharpness, reconstruction quality, lip-reading accuracy, synchronization as well as their ability to generate natural blinks.

Audio-driven talking face generation has garnered significant interest within the domain of digital human research. Existing methods are encumbered by intricate model architectures that are intricately dependent on each other, complicating the process of re-editing image or video inputs. In this work, we present ControlTalk, a talking face generation method to control face expression deformation based on driven audio, which can construct the head pose and facial expression including lip motion for both single image or sequential video inputs in a unified manner. By utilizing a pre-trained video synthesis renderer and proposing the lightweight adaptation, ControlTalk achieves precise and naturalistic lip synchronization while enabling quantitative control over mouth opening shape. Our experiments show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks, including HDTF and MEAD. The parameterized adaptation demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities, effectively handling expression deformation across same-ID and cross-ID scenarios, and extending its utility to out-of-domain portraits, regardless of languages.

The generation of stylistic 3D facial animations driven by speech poses a significant challenge as it requires learning a many-to-many mapping between speech, style, and the corresponding natural facial motion. However, existing methods either employ a deterministic model for speech-to-motion mapping or encode the style using a one-hot encoding scheme. Notably, the one-hot encoding approach fails to capture the complexity of the style and thus limits generalization ability. In this paper, we propose DiffPoseTalk, a generative framework based on the diffusion model combined with a style encoder that extracts style embeddings from short reference videos. During inference, we employ classifier-free guidance to guide the generation process based on the speech and style. We extend this to include the generation of head poses, thereby enhancing user perception. Additionally, we address the shortage of scanned 3D talking face data by training our model on reconstructed 3DMM parameters from a high-quality, in-the-wild audio-visual dataset. Our extensive experiments and user study demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Existing studies on talking video generation have predominantly focused on single-person monologues or isolated facial animations, limiting their applicability to realistic multi-human interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce MIT, a large-scale dataset specifically designed for multi-human talking video generation. To this end, we develop an automatic pipeline that collects and annotates multi-person conversational videos. The resulting dataset comprises 12 hours of high-resolution footage, each featuring two to four speakers, with fine-grained annotations of body poses and speech interactions. It captures natural conversational dynamics in multi-speaker scenario, offering a rich resource for studying interactive visual behaviors. To demonstrate the potential of MIT, we furthur propose CovOG, a baseline model for this novel task. It integrates a Multi-Human Pose Encoder (MPE) to handle varying numbers of speakers by aggregating individual pose embeddings, and an Interactive Audio Driver (IAD) to modulate head dynamics based on speaker-specific audio features. Together, these components showcase the feasibility and challenges of generating realistic multi-human talking videos, establishing MIT as a valuable benchmark for future research. The code is avalibale at: https://github.com/showlab/Multi-human-Talking-Video-Dataset.

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

In the realm of media technology, digital humans have gained prominence due to rapid advancements in computer technology. However, the manual modeling and control required for the majority of digital humans pose significant obstacles to efficient development. The speech-driven methods offer a novel avenue for manipulating the mouth shape and expressions of digital humans. Despite the proliferation of driving methods, the quality of many generated talking head (TH) videos remains a concern, impacting user visual experiences. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces the Talking Head Quality Assessment (THQA) database, featuring 800 TH videos generated through 8 diverse speech-driven methods. Extensive experiments affirm the THQA database's richness in character and speech features. Subsequent subjective quality assessment experiments analyze correlations between scoring results and speech-driven methods, ages, and genders. In addition, experimental results show that mainstream image and video quality assessment methods have limitations for the THQA database, underscoring the imperative for further research to enhance TH video quality assessment. The THQA database is publicly accessible at https://github.com/zyj-2000/THQA.

We present a method that generates expressive talking heads from a single facial image with audio as the only input. In contrast to previous approaches that attempt to learn direct mappings from audio to raw pixels or points for creating talking faces, our method first disentangles the content and speaker information in the input audio signal. The audio content robustly controls the motion of lips and nearby facial regions, while the speaker information determines the specifics of facial expressions and the rest of the talking head dynamics. Another key component of our method is the prediction of facial landmarks reflecting speaker-aware dynamics. Based on this intermediate representation, our method is able to synthesize photorealistic videos of entire talking heads with full range of motion and also animate artistic paintings, sketches, 2D cartoon characters, Japanese mangas, stylized caricatures in a single unified framework. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our method, in addition to user studies, demonstrating generated talking heads of significantly higher quality compared to prior state-of-the-art.

This paper examines the integration of real-time talking-head generation for interviewer training, focusing on overcoming challenges in Audio Feature Extraction (AFE), which often introduces latency and limits responsiveness in real-time applications. To address these issues, we propose and implement a fully integrated system that replaces conventional AFE models with Open AI's Whisper, leveraging its encoder to optimize processing and improve overall system efficiency. Our evaluation of two open-source real-time models across three different datasets shows that Whisper not only accelerates processing but also improves specific aspects of rendering quality, resulting in more realistic and responsive talking-head interactions. These advancements make the system a more effective tool for immersive, interactive training applications, expanding the potential of AI-driven avatars in interviewer training.

Speech-driven 3D talking heads generation has emerged as a significant area of interest among researchers, presenting numerous challenges. Existing methods are constrained by animating faces with fixed topologies, wherein point-wise correspondence is established, and the number and order of points remains consistent across all identities the model can animate. In this work, we present ScanTalk, a novel framework capable of animating 3D faces in arbitrary topologies including scanned data. Our approach relies on the DiffusionNet architecture to overcome the fixed topology constraint, offering promising avenues for more flexible and realistic 3D animations. By leveraging the power of DiffusionNet, ScanTalk not only adapts to diverse facial structures but also maintains fidelity when dealing with scanned data, thereby enhancing the authenticity and versatility of generated 3D talking heads. Through comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, we validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating its capacity to generate realistic talking heads comparable to existing techniques. While our primary objective is to develop a generic method free from topological constraints, all state-of-the-art methodologies are bound by such limitations. Code for reproducing our results, and the pre-trained model will be made available.

In face-to-face conversations, individuals need to switch between speaking and listening roles seamlessly. Existing 3D talking head generation models focus solely on speaking or listening, neglecting the natural dynamics of interactive conversation, which leads to unnatural interactions and awkward transitions. To address this issue, we propose a new task -- multi-round dual-speaker interaction for 3D talking head generation -- which requires models to handle and generate both speaking and listening behaviors in continuous conversation. To solve this task, we introduce DualTalk, a novel unified framework that integrates the dynamic behaviors of speakers and listeners to simulate realistic and coherent dialogue interactions. This framework not only synthesizes lifelike talking heads when speaking but also generates continuous and vivid non-verbal feedback when listening, effectively capturing the interplay between the roles. We also create a new dataset featuring 50 hours of multi-round conversations with over 1,000 characters, where participants continuously switch between speaking and listening roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the naturalness and expressiveness of 3D talking heads in dual-speaker conversations. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/dualtalk.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation is challenging due to the complex geometry of human faces and the limited availability of 3D audio-visual data. Prior works typically focus on learning phoneme-level features of short audio windows with limited context, occasionally resulting in inaccurate lip movements. To tackle this limitation, we propose a Transformer-based autoregressive model, FaceFormer, which encodes the long-term audio context and autoregressively predicts a sequence of animated 3D face meshes. To cope with the data scarcity issue, we integrate the self-supervised pre-trained speech representations. Also, we devise two biased attention mechanisms well suited to this specific task, including the biased cross-modal multi-head (MH) attention and the biased causal MH self-attention with a periodic positional encoding strategy. The former effectively aligns the audio-motion modalities, whereas the latter offers abilities to generalize to longer audio sequences. Extensive experiments and a perceptual user study show that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-arts. The code will be made available.

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. Traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) struggle to maintain consistent facial identity, while Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods, although they can address this issue, often produce mismatched lip movements, inadequate facial expressions, and unstable head poses. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic and artificial outcomes. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the "devil" in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk. This NeRF-based method effectively maintains subject identity, enhancing synchronization and realism in talking head synthesis. SyncTalk employs a Face-Sync Controller to align lip movements with speech and innovatively uses a 3D facial blendshape model to capture accurate facial expressions. Our Head-Sync Stabilizer optimizes head poses, achieving more natural head movements. The Portrait-Sync Generator restores hair details and blends the generated head with the torso for a seamless visual experience. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that SyncTalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synchronization and realism. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/synctalk

Audio-driven one-shot talking face generation methods are usually trained on video resources of various persons. However, their created videos often suffer unnatural mouth shapes and asynchronous lips because those methods struggle to learn a consistent speech style from different speakers. We observe that it would be much easier to learn a consistent speech style from a specific speaker, which leads to authentic mouth movements. Hence, we propose a novel one-shot talking face generation framework by exploring consistent correlations between audio and visual motions from a specific speaker and then transferring audio-driven motion fields to a reference image. Specifically, we develop an Audio-Visual Correlation Transformer (AVCT) that aims to infer talking motions represented by keypoint based dense motion fields from an input audio. In particular, considering audio may come from different identities in deployment, we incorporate phonemes to represent audio signals. In this manner, our AVCT can inherently generalize to audio spoken by other identities. Moreover, as face keypoints are used to represent speakers, AVCT is agnostic against appearances of the training speaker, and thus allows us to manipulate face images of different identities readily. Considering different face shapes lead to different motions, a motion field transfer module is exploited to reduce the audio-driven dense motion field gap between the training identity and the one-shot reference. Once we obtained the dense motion field of the reference image, we employ an image renderer to generate its talking face videos from an audio clip. Thanks to our learned consistent speaking style, our method generates authentic mouth shapes and vivid movements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our synthesized videos outperform the state-of-the-art in terms of visual quality and lip-sync.

The study of talking face generation mainly explores the intricacies of synchronizing facial movements and crafting visually appealing, temporally-coherent animations. However, due to the limited exploration of global audio perception, current approaches predominantly employ auxiliary visual and spatial knowledge to stabilize the movements, which often results in the deterioration of the naturalness and temporal inconsistencies.Considering the essence of audio-driven animation, the audio signal serves as the ideal and unique priors to adjust facial expressions and lip movements, without resorting to interference of any visual signals. Based on this motivation, we propose a novel paradigm, dubbed as Sonic, to {s}hift f{o}cus on the exploration of global audio per{c}ept{i}o{n}.To effectively leverage global audio knowledge, we disentangle it into intra- and inter-clip audio perception and collaborate with both aspects to enhance overall perception.For the intra-clip audio perception, 1). Context-enhanced audio learning, in which long-range intra-clip temporal audio knowledge is extracted to provide facial expression and lip motion priors implicitly expressed as the tone and speed of speech. 2). Motion-decoupled controller, in which the motion of the head and expression movement are disentangled and independently controlled by intra-audio clips. Most importantly, for inter-clip audio perception, as a bridge to connect the intra-clips to achieve the global perception, Time-aware position shift fusion, in which the global inter-clip audio information is considered and fused for long-audio inference via through consecutively time-aware shifted windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the novel audio-driven paradigm outperform existing SOTA methodologies in terms of video quality, temporally consistency, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity.

Audio-driven talking face generation is a challenging task in digital communication. Despite significant progress in the area, most existing methods concentrate on audio-lip synchronization, often overlooking aspects such as visual quality, customization, and generalization that are crucial to producing realistic talking faces. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel, customizable one-shot audio-driven talking face generation framework, named PortraitTalk. Our proposed method utilizes a latent diffusion framework consisting of two main components: IdentityNet and AnimateNet. IdentityNet is designed to preserve identity features consistently across the generated video frames, while AnimateNet aims to enhance temporal coherence and motion consistency. This framework also integrates an audio input with the reference images, thereby reducing the reliance on reference-style videos prevalent in existing approaches. A key innovation of PortraitTalk is the incorporation of text prompts through decoupled cross-attention mechanisms, which significantly expands creative control over the generated videos. Through extensive experiments, including a newly developed evaluation metric, our model demonstrates superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods, setting a new standard for the generation of customizable realistic talking faces suitable for real-world applications.

Recent advancements in audio-driven talking face generation have made great progress in lip synchronization. However, current methods often lack sufficient control over facial animation such as speaking style and emotional expression, resulting in uniform outputs. In this paper, we focus on improving two key factors: lip-audio alignment and emotion control, to enhance the diversity and user-friendliness of talking videos. Lip-audio alignment control focuses on elements like speaking style and the scale of lip movements, whereas emotion control is centered on generating realistic emotional expressions, allowing for modifications in multiple attributes such as intensity. To achieve precise control of facial animation, we propose a novel framework, PC-Talk, which enables lip-audio alignment and emotion control through implicit keypoint deformations. First, our lip-audio alignment control module facilitates precise editing of speaking styles at the word level and adjusts lip movement scales to simulate varying vocal loudness levels, maintaining lip synchronization with the audio. Second, our emotion control module generates vivid emotional facial features with pure emotional deformation. This module also enables the fine modification of intensity and the combination of multiple emotions across different facial regions. Our method demonstrates outstanding control capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both HDTF and MEAD datasets in extensive experiments.

Generating semantically coherent and visually accurate talking faces requires bridging the gap between linguistic meaning and facial articulation. Although audio-driven methods remain prevalent, their reliance on high-quality paired audio visual data and the inherent ambiguity in mapping acoustics to lip motion pose significant challenges in terms of scalability and robustness. To address these issues, we propose Text2Lip, a viseme-centric framework that constructs an interpretable phonetic-visual bridge by embedding textual input into structured viseme sequences. These mid-level units serve as a linguistically grounded prior for lip motion prediction. Furthermore, we design a progressive viseme-audio replacement strategy based on curriculum learning, enabling the model to gradually transition from real audio to pseudo-audio reconstructed from enhanced viseme features via cross-modal attention. This allows for robust generation in both audio-present and audio-free scenarios. Finally, a landmark-guided renderer synthesizes photorealistic facial videos with accurate lip synchronization. Extensive evaluations show that Text2Lip outperforms existing approaches in semantic fidelity, visual realism, and modality robustness, establishing a new paradigm for controllable and flexible talking face generation. Our project homepage is https://plyon1.github.io/Text2Lip/.

Generating realistic talking faces is a complex and widely discussed task with numerous applications. In this paper, we present DiffTalker, a novel model designed to generate lifelike talking faces through audio and landmark co-driving. DiffTalker addresses the challenges associated with directly applying diffusion models to audio control, which are traditionally trained on text-image pairs. DiffTalker consists of two agent networks: a transformer-based landmarks completion network for geometric accuracy and a diffusion-based face generation network for texture details. Landmarks play a pivotal role in establishing a seamless connection between the audio and image domains, facilitating the incorporation of knowledge from pre-trained diffusion models. This innovative approach efficiently produces articulate-speaking faces. Experimental results showcase DiffTalker's superior performance in producing clear and geometrically accurate talking faces, all without the need for additional alignment between audio and image features.

Audio-driven portrait animation aims to synthesize portrait videos that are conditioned by given audio. Animating high-fidelity and multimodal video portraits has a variety of applications. Previous methods have attempted to capture different motion modes and generate high-fidelity portrait videos by training different models or sampling signals from given videos. However, lacking correlation learning between lip-sync and other movements (e.g., head pose/eye blinking) usually leads to unnatural results. In this paper, we propose a unified system for multi-person, diverse, and high-fidelity talking portrait generation. Our method contains three stages, i.e., 1) Mapping-Once network with Dual Attentions (MODA) generates talking representation from given audio. In MODA, we design a dual-attention module to encode accurate mouth movements and diverse modalities. 2) Facial composer network generates dense and detailed face landmarks, and 3) temporal-guided renderer syntheses stable videos. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed system produces more natural and realistic video portraits compared to previous methods.

In this work, we extend the instruction-tuned Llama-2 model with end-to-end general-purpose speech processing and reasoning abilities while maintaining the wide range of LLM capabilities, without using any carefully curated paired data. The proposed model can utilize audio prompts as a replacement for text and sustain a conversation. Such a model also has extended cross-modal capabilities such as being able to perform speech question answering, speech translation, and audio summarization amongst many other closed and open-domain tasks. This is unlike prior approaches in speech, in which LLMs are extended to handle audio for a limited number of pre-designated tasks. Experiments show that our end-to-end approach is on par with or outperforms a cascaded system (speech recognizer + LLM) in terms of modeling the response to a prompt. Furthermore, unlike a cascade, our approach shows the ability to interchange text and audio modalities and utilize the prior context in a conversation to provide better results.

Audio-driven talking face generation has received growing interest, particularly for applications requiring expressive and natural human-avatar interaction. However, most existing emotion-aware methods rely on a single modality (either audio or image) for emotion embedding, limiting their ability to capture nuanced affective cues. Additionally, most methods condition on a single reference image, restricting the model's ability to represent dynamic changes in actions or attributes across time. To address these issues, we introduce SynchroRaMa, a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal emotion embedding by combining emotional signals from text (via sentiment analysis) and audio (via speech-based emotion recognition and audio-derived valence-arousal features), enabling the generation of talking face videos with richer and more authentic emotional expressiveness and fidelity. To ensure natural head motion and accurate lip synchronization, SynchroRaMa includes an audio-to-motion (A2M) module that generates motion frames aligned with the input audio. Finally, SynchroRaMa incorporates scene descriptions generated by Large Language Model (LLM) as additional textual input, enabling it to capture dynamic actions and high-level semantic attributes. Conditioning the model on both visual and textual cues enhances temporal consistency and visual realism. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SynchroRaMa outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving improvements in image quality, expression preservation, and motion realism. A user study further confirms that SynchroRaMa achieves higher subjective ratings than competing methods in overall naturalness, motion diversity, and video smoothness. Our project page is available at <https://novicemm.github.io/synchrorama>.

This study delves into the intricacies of synchronizing facial dynamics with multilingual audio inputs, focusing on the creation of visually compelling, time-synchronized animations through diffusion-based techniques. Diverging from traditional parametric models for facial animation, our approach, termed LinguaLinker, adopts a holistic diffusion-based framework that integrates audio-driven visual synthesis to enhance the synergy between auditory stimuli and visual responses. We process audio features separately and derive the corresponding control gates, which implicitly govern the movements in the mouth, eyes, and head, irrespective of the portrait's origin. The advanced audio-driven visual synthesis mechanism provides nuanced control but keeps the compatibility of output video and input audio, allowing for a more tailored and effective portrayal of distinct personas across different languages. The significant improvements in the fidelity of animated portraits, the accuracy of lip-syncing, and the appropriate motion variations achieved by our method render it a versatile tool for animating any portrait in any language.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic lip movements and facial expressions for 3D head models from arbitrary audio clips. Although existing diffusion-based methods are capable of producing natural motions, their slow generation speed limits their application potential. In this paper, we introduce a novel autoregressive model that achieves real-time generation of highly synchronized lip movements and realistic head poses and eye blinks by learning a mapping from speech to a multi-scale motion codebook. Furthermore, our model can adapt to unseen speaking styles using sample motion sequences, enabling the creation of 3D talking avatars with unique personal styles beyond the identities seen during training. Extensive evaluations and user studies demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in lip synchronization accuracy and perceived quality.

Portrait animation aims to synthesize talking videos from a static reference face, conditioned on audio and style frame cues (e.g., emotion and head poses), while ensuring precise lip synchronization and faithful reproduction of speaking styles. Existing diffusion-based portrait animation methods primarily focus on lip synchronization or static emotion transformation, often overlooking dynamic styles such as head movements. Moreover, most of these methods rely on a dual U-Net architecture, which preserves identity consistency but incurs additional computational overhead. To this end, we propose DiTalker, a unified DiT-based framework for speaking style-controllable portrait animation. We design a Style-Emotion Encoding Module that employs two separate branches: a style branch extracting identity-specific style information (e.g., head poses and movements), and an emotion branch extracting identity-agnostic emotion features. We further introduce an Audio-Style Fusion Module that decouples audio and speaking styles via two parallel cross-attention layers, using these features to guide the animation process. To enhance the quality of results, we adopt and modify two optimization constraints: one to improve lip synchronization and the other to preserve fine-grained identity and background details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DiTalker in terms of lip synchronization and speaking style controllability. Project Page: https://thenameishope.github.io/DiTalker/

For audio-driven visual dubbing, it remains a considerable challenge to uphold and highlight speaker's persona while synthesizing accurate lip synchronization. Existing methods fall short of capturing speaker's unique speaking style or preserving facial details. In this paper, we present PersonaTalk, an attention-based two-stage framework, including geometry construction and face rendering, for high-fidelity and personalized visual dubbing. In the first stage, we propose a style-aware audio encoding module that injects speaking style into audio features through a cross-attention layer. The stylized audio features are then used to drive speaker's template geometry to obtain lip-synced geometries. In the second stage, a dual-attention face renderer is introduced to render textures for the target geometries. It consists of two parallel cross-attention layers, namely Lip-Attention and Face-Attention, which respectively sample textures from different reference frames to render the entire face. With our innovative design, intricate facial details can be well preserved. Comprehensive experiments and user studies demonstrate our advantages over other state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality, lip-sync accuracy and persona preservation. Furthermore, as a person-generic framework, PersonaTalk can achieve competitive performance as state-of-the-art person-specific methods. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/PersonaTalk/.

Person-generic audio-driven face generation is a challenging task in computer vision. Previous methods have achieved remarkable progress in audio-visual synchronization, but there is still a significant gap between current results and practical applications. The challenges are two-fold: 1) Preserving unique individual traits for achieving high-precision lip synchronization. 2) Generating high-quality facial renderings in real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized audio-driven framework RealTalk, which consists of an audio-to-expression transformer and a high-fidelity expression-to-face renderer. In the first component, we consider both identity and intra-personal variation features related to speaking lip movements. By incorporating cross-modal attention on the enriched facial priors, we can effectively align lip movements with audio, thus attaining greater precision in expression prediction. In the second component, we design a lightweight facial identity alignment (FIA) module which includes a lip-shape control structure and a face texture reference structure. This novel design allows us to generate fine details in real-time, without depending on sophisticated and inefficient feature alignment modules. Our experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, on public datasets demonstrate the clear advantages of our method in terms of lip-speech synchronization and generation quality. Furthermore, our method is efficient and requires fewer computational resources, making it well-suited to meet the needs of practical applications.

We present a new listening head generation benchmark, for synthesizing responsive feedbacks of a listener (e.g., nod, smile) during a face-to-face conversation. As the indispensable complement to talking heads generation, listening head generation has seldomly been studied in literature. Automatically synthesizing listening behavior that actively responds to a talking head, is critical to applications such as digital human, virtual agents and social robots. In this work, we propose a novel dataset "ViCo", highlighting the listening head generation during a face-to-face conversation. A total number of 92 identities (67 speakers and 76 listeners) are involved in ViCo, featuring 483 clips in a paired "speaking-listening" pattern, where listeners show three listening styles based on their attitudes: positive, neutral, negative. Different from traditional speech-to-gesture or talking-head generation, listening head generation takes as input both the audio and visual signals from the speaker, and gives non-verbal feedbacks (e.g., head motions, facial expressions) in a real-time manner. Our dataset supports a wide range of applications such as human-to-human interaction, video-to-video translation, cross-modal understanding and generation. To encourage further research, we also release a listening head generation baseline, conditioning on different listening attitudes. Code & ViCo dataset: https://project.mhzhou.com/vico.

Recent advancements in spoken dialogue models, exemplified by systems like GPT-4o, have captured significant attention in the speech domain. Compared to traditional three-tier cascaded spoken dialogue models that comprise speech recognition (ASR), large language models (LLMs), and text-to-speech (TTS), modern spoken dialogue models exhibit greater intelligence. These advanced spoken dialogue models not only comprehend audio, music, and other speech-related features, but also capture stylistic and timbral characteristics in speech. Moreover, they generate high-quality, multi-turn speech responses with low latency, enabling real-time interaction through simultaneous listening and speaking capability. Despite the progress in spoken dialogue systems, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically organize and analyze these systems and the underlying technologies. To address this, we have first compiled existing spoken dialogue systems in the chronological order and categorized them into the cascaded and end-to-end paradigms. We then provide an in-depth overview of the core technologies in spoken dialogue models, covering aspects such as speech representation, training paradigm, streaming, duplex, and interaction capabilities. Each section discusses the limitations of these technologies and outlines considerations for future research. Additionally, we present a thorough review of relevant datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks from the perspectives of training and evaluating spoken dialogue systems. We hope this survey will contribute to advancing both academic research and industrial applications in the field of spoken dialogue systems. The related material is available at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavChat.

Portrait image animation using audio has rapidly advanced, enabling the creation of increasingly realistic and expressive animated faces. The challenges of this multimodality-guided video generation task involve fusing various modalities while ensuring consistency in timing and portrait. We further seek to produce vivid talking heads. To address these challenges, we present LetsTalk (LatEnt Diffusion TranSformer for Talking Video Synthesis), a diffusion transformer that incorporates modular temporal and spatial attention mechanisms to merge multimodality and enhance spatial-temporal consistency. To handle multimodal conditions, we first summarize three fusion schemes, ranging from shallow to deep fusion compactness, and thoroughly explore their impact and applicability. Then we propose a suitable solution according to the modality differences of image, audio, and video generation. For portrait, we utilize a deep fusion scheme (Symbiotic Fusion) to ensure portrait consistency. For audio, we implement a shallow fusion scheme (Direct Fusion) to achieve audio-animation alignment while preserving diversity. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach generates temporally coherent and realistic videos with enhanced diversity and liveliness.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Despite the recent success, current LLMs are not capable of processing complex audio information or conducting spoken conversations (like Siri or Alexa). In this work, we propose a multi-modal AI system named AudioGPT, which complements LLMs (i.e., ChatGPT) with 1) foundation models to process complex audio information and solve numerous understanding and generation tasks; and 2) the input/output interface (ASR, TTS) to support spoken dialogue. With an increasing demand to evaluate multi-modal LLMs of human intention understanding and cooperation with foundation models, we outline the principles and processes and test AudioGPT in terms of consistency, capability, and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of AudioGPT in solving AI tasks with speech, music, sound, and talking head understanding and generation in multi-round dialogues, which empower humans to create rich and diverse audio content with unprecedented ease. Our system is publicly available at https://github.com/AIGC-Audio/AudioGPT.

Audio-driven facial animation presents an effective solution for animating digital avatars. In this paper, we detail the technical aspects of NVIDIA Audio2Face-3D, including data acquisition, network architecture, retargeting methodology, evaluation metrics, and use cases. Audio2Face-3D system enables real-time interaction between human users and interactive avatars, facilitating facial animation authoring for game characters. To assist digital avatar creators and game developers in generating realistic facial animations, we have open-sourced Audio2Face-3D networks, SDK, training framework, and example dataset.

Recent advances in diffusion models have led to significant progress in audio-driven lip synchronization. However, existing methods typically rely on constrained audio-visual alignment priors or multi-stage learning of intermediate representations to force lip motion synthesis. This leads to complex training pipelines and limited motion naturalness. In this paper, we present SayAnything, a conditional video diffusion framework that directly synthesizes lip movements from audio input while preserving speaker identity. Specifically, we propose three specialized modules including identity preservation module, audio guidance module, and editing control module. Our novel design effectively balances different condition signals in the latent space, enabling precise control over appearance, motion, and region-specific generation without requiring additional supervision signals or intermediate representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SayAnything generates highly realistic videos with improved lip-teeth coherence, enabling unseen characters to say anything, while effectively generalizing to animated characters.

Head avatars animated by visual signals have gained popularity, particularly in cross-driving synthesis where the driver differs from the animated character, a challenging but highly practical approach. The recently presented MegaPortraits model has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in this domain. We conduct a deep examination and evaluation of this model, with a particular focus on its latent space for facial expression descriptors, and uncover several limitations with its ability to express intense face motions. To address these limitations, we propose substantial changes in both training pipeline and model architecture, to introduce our EMOPortraits model, where we: Enhance the model's capability to faithfully support intense, asymmetric face expressions, setting a new state-of-the-art result in the emotion transfer task, surpassing previous methods in both metrics and quality. Incorporate speech-driven mode to our model, achieving top-tier performance in audio-driven facial animation, making it possible to drive source identity through diverse modalities, including visual signal, audio, or a blend of both. We propose a novel multi-view video dataset featuring a wide range of intense and asymmetric facial expressions, filling the gap with absence of such data in existing datasets.

This paper presents VoiceLDM, a model designed to produce audio that accurately follows two distinct natural language text prompts: the description prompt and the content prompt. The former provides information about the overall environmental context of the audio, while the latter conveys the linguistic content. To achieve this, we adopt a text-to-audio (TTA) model based on latent diffusion models and extend its functionality to incorporate an additional content prompt as a conditional input. By utilizing pretrained contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) and Whisper, VoiceLDM is trained on large amounts of real-world audio without manual annotations or transcriptions. Additionally, we employ dual classifier-free guidance to further enhance the controllability of VoiceLDM. Experimental results demonstrate that VoiceLDM is capable of generating plausible audio that aligns well with both input conditions, even surpassing the speech intelligibility of the ground truth audio on the AudioCaps test set. Furthermore, we explore the text-to-speech (TTS) and zero-shot text-to-audio capabilities of VoiceLDM and show that it achieves competitive results. Demos and code are available at https://voiceldm.github.io.

In this work, we tackle the challenge of enhancing the realism and expressiveness in talking head video generation by focusing on the dynamic and nuanced relationship between audio cues and facial movements. We identify the limitations of traditional techniques that often fail to capture the full spectrum of human expressions and the uniqueness of individual facial styles. To address these issues, we propose EMO, a novel framework that utilizes a direct audio-to-video synthesis approach, bypassing the need for intermediate 3D models or facial landmarks. Our method ensures seamless frame transitions and consistent identity preservation throughout the video, resulting in highly expressive and lifelike animations. Experimental results demonsrate that EMO is able to produce not only convincing speaking videos but also singing videos in various styles, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methodologies in terms of expressiveness and realism.

Diffusion-based talking head models generate high-quality, photorealistic videos but suffer from slow inference, limiting practical applications. Existing acceleration methods for general diffusion models fail to exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies unique to talking head generation. In this paper, we propose a task-specific framework addressing these inefficiencies through two key innovations. First, we introduce Lightning-fast Caching-based Parallel denoising prediction (LightningCP), caching static features to bypass most model layers in inference time. We also enable parallel prediction using cached features and estimated noisy latents as inputs, efficiently bypassing sequential sampling. Second, we propose Decoupled Foreground Attention (DFA) to further accelerate attention computations, exploiting the spatial decoupling in talking head videos to restrict attention to dynamic foreground regions. Additionally, we remove reference features in certain layers to bring extra speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves inference speed while preserving video quality.

Vivid talking face generation holds immense potential applications across diverse multimedia domains, such as film and game production. While existing methods accurately synchronize lip movements with input audio, they typically ignore crucial alignments between emotion and facial cues, which include expression, gaze, and head pose. These alignments are indispensable for synthesizing realistic videos. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage audio-driven talking face generation framework that employs 3D facial landmarks as intermediate variables. This framework achieves collaborative alignment of expression, gaze, and pose with emotions through self-supervised learning. Specifically, we decompose this task into two key steps, namely speech-to-landmarks synthesis and landmarks-to-face generation. The first step focuses on simultaneously synthesizing emotionally aligned facial cues, including normalized landmarks that represent expressions, gaze, and head pose. These cues are subsequently reassembled into relocated facial landmarks. In the second step, these relocated landmarks are mapped to latent key points using self-supervised learning and then input into a pretrained model to create high-quality face images. Extensive experiments on the MEAD dataset demonstrate that our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and emotional alignment.

Audio-driven video generation aims to synthesize realistic videos that align with input audio recordings, akin to the human ability to visualize scenes from auditory input. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on exploring semantic information, such as the classes of sounding sources present in the audio, limiting their ability to generate videos with accurate content and spatial composition. In contrast, we humans can not only naturally identify the semantic categories of sounding sources but also determine their deeply encoded spatial attributes, including locations and movement directions. This useful information can be elucidated by considering specific spatial indicators derived from the inherent physical properties of sound, such as loudness or frequency. As prior methods largely ignore this factor, we present SpA2V, the first framework explicitly exploits these spatial auditory cues from audios to generate videos with high semantic and spatial correspondence. SpA2V decomposes the generation process into two stages: 1) Audio-guided Video Planning: We meticulously adapt a state-of-the-art MLLM for a novel task of harnessing spatial and semantic cues from input audio to construct Video Scene Layouts (VSLs). This serves as an intermediate representation to bridge the gap between the audio and video modalities. 2) Layout-grounded Video Generation: We develop an efficient and effective approach to seamlessly integrate VSLs as conditional guidance into pre-trained diffusion models, enabling VSL-grounded video generation in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpA2V excels in generating realistic videos with semantic and spatial alignment to the input audios.

A demonstration of a real-time and continuous turn-taking prediction system is presented. The system is based on a voice activity projection (VAP) model, which directly maps dialogue stereo audio to future voice activities. The VAP model includes contrastive predictive coding (CPC) and self-attention transformers, followed by a cross-attention transformer. We examine the effect of the input context audio length and demonstrate that the proposed system can operate in real-time with CPU settings, with minimal performance degradation.

Face-to-face communication, as a common human activity, motivates the research on interactive head generation. A virtual agent can generate motion responses with both listening and speaking capabilities based on the audio or motion signals of the other user and itself. However, previous clip-wise generation paradigm or explicit listener/speaker generator-switching methods have limitations in future signal acquisition, contextual behavioral understanding, and switching smoothness, making it challenging to be real-time and realistic. In this paper, we propose an autoregressive (AR) based frame-wise framework called ARIG to realize the real-time generation with better interaction realism. To achieve real-time generation, we model motion prediction as a non-vector-quantized AR process. Unlike discrete codebook-index prediction, we represent motion distribution using diffusion procedure, achieving more accurate predictions in continuous space. To improve interaction realism, we emphasize interactive behavior understanding (IBU) and detailed conversational state understanding (CSU). In IBU, based on dual-track dual-modal signals, we summarize short-range behaviors through bidirectional-integrated learning and perform contextual understanding over long ranges. In CSU, we use voice activity signals and context features of IBU to understand the various states (interruption, feedback, pause, etc.) that exist in actual conversations. These serve as conditions for the final progressive motion prediction. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our model.

Existing datasets for audio understanding primarily focus on single-turn interactions (i.e. audio captioning, audio question answering) for describing audio in natural language, thus limiting understanding audio via interactive dialogue. To address this gap, we introduce Audio Dialogues: a multi-turn dialogue dataset containing 163.8k samples for general audio sounds and music. In addition to dialogues, Audio Dialogues also has question-answer pairs to understand and compare multiple input audios together. Audio Dialogues leverages a prompting-based approach and caption annotations from existing datasets to generate multi-turn dialogues using a Large Language Model (LLM). We evaluate existing audio-augmented large language models on our proposed dataset to demonstrate the complexity and applicability of Audio Dialogues. Our code for generating the dataset will be made publicly available. Detailed prompts and generated dialogues can be found on the demo website https://audiodialogues.github.io/.

Despite the recent progress of audio-driven video generation, existing methods mostly focus on driving facial movements, leading to non-coherent head and body dynamics. Moving forward, it is desirable yet challenging to generate holistic human videos with both accurate lip-sync and delicate co-speech gestures w.r.t. given audio. In this work, we propose AudCast, a generalized audio-driven human video generation framework adopting a cascade Diffusion-Transformers (DiTs) paradigm, which synthesizes holistic human videos based on a reference image and a given audio. 1) Firstly, an audio-conditioned Holistic Human DiT architecture is proposed to directly drive the movements of any human body with vivid gesture dynamics. 2) Then to enhance hand and face details that are well-knownly difficult to handle, a Regional Refinement DiT leverages regional 3D fitting as the bridge to reform the signals, producing the final results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates high-fidelity audio-driven holistic human videos with temporal coherence and fine facial and hand details. Resources can be found at https://guanjz20.github.io/projects/AudCast.

Existing for audio- and pose-driven human animation methods often struggle with stiff head movements and blurry hands, primarily due to the weak correlation between audio and head movements and the structural complexity of hands. To address these issues, we propose VividAnimator, an end-to-end framework for generating high-quality, half-body human animations driven by audio and sparse hand pose conditions. Our framework introduces three key innovations. First, to overcome the instability and high cost of online codebook training, we pre-train a Hand Clarity Codebook (HCC) that encodes rich, high-fidelity hand texture priors, significantly mitigating hand degradation. Second, we design a Dual-Stream Audio-Aware Module (DSAA) to model lip synchronization and natural head pose dynamics separately while enabling interaction. Third, we introduce a Pose Calibration Trick (PCT) that refines and aligns pose conditions by relaxing rigid constraints, ensuring smooth and natural gesture transitions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Vivid Animator achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing videos with superior hand detail, gesture realism, and identity consistency, validated by both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations.

We present SoundStorm, a model for efficient, non-autoregressive audio generation. SoundStorm receives as input the semantic tokens of AudioLM, and relies on bidirectional attention and confidence-based parallel decoding to generate the tokens of a neural audio codec. Compared to the autoregressive generation approach of AudioLM, our model produces audio of the same quality and with higher consistency in voice and acoustic conditions, while being two orders of magnitude faster. SoundStorm generates 30 seconds of audio in 0.5 seconds on a TPU-v4. We demonstrate the ability of our model to scale audio generation to longer sequences by synthesizing high-quality, natural dialogue segments, given a transcript annotated with speaker turns and a short prompt with the speakers' voices.

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D talking heads with controllable emotion, featuring enhanced lip synchronization and rendering quality. Despite significant progress in the field, prior methods still suffer from multi-view consistency and a lack of emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we collect EmoTalk3D dataset with calibrated multi-view videos, emotional annotations, and per-frame 3D geometry. By training on the EmoTalk3D dataset, we propose a `Speech-to-Geometry-to-Appearance' mapping framework that first predicts faithful 3D geometry sequence from the audio features, then the appearance of a 3D talking head represented by 4D Gaussians is synthesized from the predicted geometry. The appearance is further disentangled into canonical and dynamic Gaussians, learned from multi-view videos, and fused to render free-view talking head animation. Moreover, our model enables controllable emotion in the generated talking heads and can be rendered in wide-range views. Our method exhibits improved rendering quality and stability in lip motion generation while capturing dynamic facial details such as wrinkles and subtle expressions. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-fidelity and emotion-controllable 3D talking heads. The code and EmoTalk3D dataset are released at https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/EmoTalk3D.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale visual-audio datasets despite extensive research. Most prior works, typically focused on learning regression models on a small dataset using the method of least squares, encounter difficulties generating diverse lip movements from speech and require substantial effort in refining the generated outputs. To address these issues, we propose a speech-driven 3D facial animation with a diffusion model (SAiD), a lightweight Transformer-based U-Net with a cross-modality alignment bias between audio and visual to enhance lip synchronization. Moreover, we introduce BlendVOCA, a benchmark dataset of pairs of speech audio and parameters of a blendshape facial model, to address the scarcity of public resources. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves comparable or superior performance in lip synchronization to baselines, ensures more diverse lip movements, and streamlines the animation editing process.

Recent studies in speech-driven 3D talking head generation have achieved convincing results in verbal articulations. However, generating accurate lip-syncs degrades when applied to input speech in other languages, possibly due to the lack of datasets covering a broad spectrum of facial movements across languages. In this work, we introduce a novel task to generate 3D talking heads from speeches of diverse languages. We collect a new multilingual 2D video dataset comprising over 420 hours of talking videos in 20 languages. With our proposed dataset, we present a multilingually enhanced model that incorporates language-specific style embeddings, enabling it to capture the unique mouth movements associated with each language. Additionally, we present a metric for assessing lip-sync accuracy in multilingual settings. We demonstrate that training a 3D talking head model with our proposed dataset significantly enhances its multilingual performance. Codes and datasets are available at https://multi-talk.github.io/.

We present a novel one-shot talking head synthesis method that achieves disentangled and fine-grained control over lip motion, eye gaze&blink, head pose, and emotional expression. We represent different motions via disentangled latent representations and leverage an image generator to synthesize talking heads from them. To effectively disentangle each motion factor, we propose a progressive disentangled representation learning strategy by separating the factors in a coarse-to-fine manner, where we first extract unified motion feature from the driving signal, and then isolate each fine-grained motion from the unified feature. We introduce motion-specific contrastive learning and regressing for non-emotional motions, and feature-level decorrelation and self-reconstruction for emotional expression, to fully utilize the inherent properties of each motion factor in unstructured video data to achieve disentanglement. Experiments show that our method provides high quality speech&lip-motion synchronization along with precise and disentangled control over multiple extra facial motions, which can hardly be achieved by previous methods.

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved audio-driven human video generation, surpassing traditional methods in both quality and controllability. However, existing approaches still face challenges in lip-sync accuracy, temporal coherence for long video generation, and multi-character animation. In this work, we propose a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based framework for generating lifelike talking videos of arbitrary length, and introduce a training-free method for multi-character audio-driven animation. First, we employ a LoRA-based training strategy combined with a position shift inference approach, which enables efficient long video generation while preserving the capabilities of the foundation model. Moreover, we combine partial parameter updates with reward feedback to enhance both lip synchronization and natural body motion. Finally, we propose a training-free approach, Mask Classifier-Free Guidance (Mask-CFG), for multi-character animation, which requires no specialized datasets or model modifications and supports audio-driven animation for three or more characters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving high-quality, temporally coherent, and multi-character audio-driven video generation in a simple, efficient, and cost-effective manner.

Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.

In daily life, we encounter a variety of sounds, both desirable and undesirable, with limited control over their presence and volume. Our work introduces "Listen, Chat, and Edit" (LCE), a novel multimodal sound mixture editor that modifies each sound source in a mixture based on user-provided text instructions. LCE distinguishes itself with a user-friendly chat interface and its unique ability to edit multiple sound sources simultaneously within a mixture, without needing to separate them. Users input open-vocabulary text prompts, which are interpreted by a large language model to create a semantic filter for editing the sound mixture. The system then decomposes the mixture into its components, applies the semantic filter, and reassembles it into the desired output. We developed a 160-hour dataset with over 100k mixtures, including speech and various audio sources, along with text prompts for diverse editing tasks like extraction, removal, and volume control. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in signal quality across all editing tasks and robust performance in zero-shot scenarios with varying numbers and types of sound sources.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, with applications in gaming, character animation, virtual reality, and telepresence systems. State-of-the-art methods deform the face topology of the target actor to sync the input audio without considering the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor, thus, resulting in unrealistic and inaccurate lip movements. To address this, we present Imitator, a speech-driven facial expression synthesis method, which learns identity-specific details from a short input video and produces novel facial expressions matching the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor. Specifically, we train a style-agnostic transformer on a large facial expression dataset which we use as a prior for audio-driven facial expressions. Based on this prior, we optimize for identity-specific speaking style based on a short reference video. To train the prior, we introduce a novel loss function based on detected bilabial consonants to ensure plausible lip closures and consequently improve the realism of the generated expressions. Through detailed experiments and a user study, we show that our approach produces temporally coherent facial expressions from input audio while preserving the speaking style of the target actors.

We propose a neural talking-head video synthesis model and demonstrate its application to video conferencing. Our model learns to synthesize a talking-head video using a source image containing the target person's appearance and a driving video that dictates the motion in the output. Our motion is encoded based on a novel keypoint representation, where the identity-specific and motion-related information is decomposed unsupervisedly. Extensive experimental validation shows that our model outperforms competing methods on benchmark datasets. Moreover, our compact keypoint representation enables a video conferencing system that achieves the same visual quality as the commercial H.264 standard while only using one-tenth of the bandwidth. Besides, we show our keypoint representation allows the user to rotate the head during synthesis, which is useful for simulating face-to-face video conferencing experiences.

To enhance immersive experiences, binaural audio offers spatial awareness of sounding objects in AR, VR, and embodied AI applications. While existing audio spatialization methods can generally map any available monaural audio to binaural audio signals, they often lack the flexible and interactive control needed in complex multi-object user-interactive environments. To address this, we propose a Text-guided Audio Spatialization (TAS) framework that utilizes flexible text prompts and evaluates our model from unified generation and comprehension perspectives. Due to the limited availability of premium and large-scale stereo data, we construct the SpatialTAS dataset, which encompasses 376,000 simulated binaural audio samples to facilitate the training of our model. Our model learns binaural differences guided by 3D spatial location and relative position prompts, augmented by flipped-channel audio. It outperforms existing methods on both simulated and real-recorded datasets, demonstrating superior generalization and accuracy. Besides, we develop an assessment model based on Llama-3.1-8B, which evaluates the spatial semantic coherence between our generated binaural audio and text prompts through a spatial reasoning task. Results demonstrate that text prompts provide flexible and interactive control to generate binaural audio with excellent quality and semantic consistency in spatial locations. Dataset is available at https://github.com/Alice01010101/TASU

The area of portrait image animation, propelled by audio input, has witnessed notable progress in the generation of lifelike and dynamic portraits. Conventional methods are limited to utilizing either audios or facial key points to drive images into videos, while they can yield satisfactory results, certain issues exist. For instance, methods driven solely by audios can be unstable at times due to the relatively weaker audio signal, while methods driven exclusively by facial key points, although more stable in driving, can result in unnatural outcomes due to the excessive control of key point information. In addressing the previously mentioned challenges, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach which we named EchoMimic. EchoMimic is concurrently trained using both audios and facial landmarks. Through the implementation of a novel training strategy, EchoMimic is capable of generating portrait videos not only by audios and facial landmarks individually, but also by a combination of both audios and selected facial landmarks. EchoMimic has been comprehensively compared with alternative algorithms across various public datasets and our collected dataset, showcasing superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Additional visualization and access to the source code can be located on the EchoMimic project page.

The auditory system plays a substantial role in shaping the overall human perceptual experience. While prevailing large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) have shown their promise in solving a wide variety of vision and language understanding tasks, only a few of them can be generalised to the audio domain without compromising their domain-specific capacity. In this work, we introduce Acoustic Prompt Turning (APT), a new adapter extending LLMs and VLMs to the audio domain by soft prompting only. Specifically, APT applies an instruction-aware audio aligner to generate soft prompts, conditioned on both input text and sounds, as language model inputs. To mitigate the data scarcity in the audio domain, a multi-task learning strategy is proposed by formulating diverse audio tasks in a sequence-to-sequence manner. Moreover, we improve the framework of audio language model by using interleaved audio-text embeddings as the input sequence. This improved framework imposes zero constraints on the input format and thus is capable of tackling more understanding tasks, such as few-shot audio classification and audio reasoning. To further evaluate the reasoning ability of audio networks, we propose natural language audio reasoning (NLAR), a new task that analyses across two audio clips by comparison and summarization. Experiments show that APT-enhanced LLMs (namely APT-LLMs) achieve competitive results compared to the expert models (i.e., the networks trained on the targeted datasets) across various tasks. We finally demonstrate the APT's ability in extending frozen VLMs to the audio domain without finetuning, achieving promising results in the audio-visual question and answering task. Our code and model weights are released at https://github.com/JinhuaLiang/APT.

In crowded settings, the human brain can focus on speech from a target speaker, given prior knowledge of how they sound. We introduce a novel intelligent hearable system that achieves this capability, enabling target speech hearing to ignore all interfering speech and noise, but the target speaker. A naive approach is to require a clean speech example to enroll the target speaker. This is however not well aligned with the hearable application domain since obtaining a clean example is challenging in real world scenarios, creating a unique user interface problem. We present the first enrollment interface where the wearer looks at the target speaker for a few seconds to capture a single, short, highly noisy, binaural example of the target speaker. This noisy example is used for enrollment and subsequent speech extraction in the presence of interfering speakers and noise. Our system achieves a signal quality improvement of 7.01 dB using less than 5 seconds of noisy enrollment audio and can process 8 ms of audio chunks in 6.24 ms on an embedded CPU. Our user studies demonstrate generalization to real-world static and mobile speakers in previously unseen indoor and outdoor multipath environments. Finally, our enrollment interface for noisy examples does not cause performance degradation compared to clean examples, while being convenient and user-friendly. Taking a step back, this paper takes an important step towards enhancing the human auditory perception with artificial intelligence. We provide code and data at: https://github.com/vb000/LookOnceToHear.

Audio is an essential part of our life, but creating it often requires expertise and is time-consuming. Research communities have made great progress over the past year advancing the performance of large scale audio generative models for a single modality (speech, sound, or music) through adopting more powerful generative models and scaling data. However, these models lack controllability in several aspects: speech generation models cannot synthesize novel styles based on text description and are limited on domain coverage such as outdoor environments; sound generation models only provide coarse-grained control based on descriptions like "a person speaking" and would only generate mumbling human voices. This paper presents Audiobox, a unified model based on flow-matching that is capable of generating various audio modalities. We design description-based and example-based prompting to enhance controllability and unify speech and sound generation paradigms. We allow transcript, vocal, and other audio styles to be controlled independently when generating speech. To improve model generalization with limited labels, we adapt a self-supervised infilling objective to pre-train on large quantities of unlabeled audio. Audiobox sets new benchmarks on speech and sound generation (0.745 similarity on Librispeech for zero-shot TTS; 0.77 FAD on AudioCaps for text-to-sound) and unlocks new methods for generating audio with novel vocal and acoustic styles. We further integrate Bespoke Solvers, which speeds up generation by over 25 times compared to the default ODE solver for flow-matching, without loss of performance on several tasks. Our demo is available at https://audiobox.metademolab.com/

Recent advancements in speech-driven 3D talking head generation have made significant progress in lip synchronization. However, existing models still struggle to capture the perceptual alignment between varying speech characteristics and corresponding lip movements. In this work, we claim that three criteria -- Temporal Synchronization, Lip Readability, and Expressiveness -- are crucial for achieving perceptually accurate lip movements. Motivated by our hypothesis that a desirable representation space exists to meet these three criteria, we introduce a speech-mesh synchronized representation that captures intricate correspondences between speech signals and 3D face meshes. We found that our learned representation exhibits desirable characteristics, and we plug it into existing models as a perceptual loss to better align lip movements to the given speech. In addition, we utilize this representation as a perceptual metric and introduce two other physically grounded lip synchronization metrics to assess how well the generated 3D talking heads align with these three criteria. Experiments show that training 3D talking head generation models with our perceptual loss significantly improve all three aspects of perceptually accurate lip synchronization. Codes and datasets are available at https://perceptual-3d-talking-head.github.io/.

The objective of face animation is to generate dynamic and expressive talking head videos from a single reference face, utilizing driving conditions derived from either video or audio inputs. Current approaches often require fine-tuning for specific identities and frequently fail to produce expressive videos due to the limited effectiveness of Wav2Pose modules. To facilitate the generation of one-shot and more consecutive talking head videos, we refine an existing Image2Video model by integrating a Face Locator and Motion Frame mechanism. We subsequently optimize the model using extensive human face video datasets, significantly enhancing its ability to produce high-quality and expressive talking head videos. Additionally, we develop a demo platform using the Gradio framework, which streamlines the process, enabling users to quickly create customized talking head videos.

Auditory foundation models, including auditory large language models (LLMs), process all sound inputs equally, independent of listener perception. However, human auditory perception is inherently selective: listeners focus on specific speakers while ignoring others in complex auditory scenes. Existing models do not incorporate this selectivity, limiting their ability to generate perception-aligned responses. To address this, we introduce Intention-Informed Auditory Scene Understanding (II-ASU) and present Auditory Attention-Driven LLM (AAD-LLM), a prototype system that integrates brain signals to infer listener attention. AAD-LLM extends an auditory LLM by incorporating intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings to decode which speaker a listener is attending to and refine responses accordingly. The model first predicts the attended speaker from neural activity, then conditions response generation on this inferred attentional state. We evaluate AAD-LLM on speaker description, speech transcription and extraction, and question answering in multitalker scenarios, with both objective and subjective ratings showing improved alignment with listener intention. By taking a first step toward intention-aware auditory AI, this work explores a new paradigm where listener perception informs machine listening, paving the way for future listener-centered auditory systems. Demo and code available: https://aad-llm.github.io.

Existing audio-driven facial animation methods face critical challenges, including expression leakage, ineffective subtle expression transfer, and imprecise audio-driven synchronization. We discovered that these issues stem from limitations in motion representation and the lack of fine-grained control over facial expressions. To address these problems, we present Takin-ADA, a novel two-stage approach for real-time audio-driven portrait animation. In the first stage, we introduce a specialized loss function that enhances subtle expression transfer while reducing unwanted expression leakage. The second stage utilizes an advanced audio processing technique to improve lip-sync accuracy. Our method not only generates precise lip movements but also allows flexible control over facial expressions and head motions. Takin-ADA achieves high-resolution (512x512) facial animations at up to 42 FPS on an RTX 4090 GPU, outperforming existing commercial solutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly surpasses previous methods in video quality, facial dynamics realism, and natural head movements, setting a new benchmark in the field of audio-driven facial animation.

This paper introduces Stereo-Talker, a novel one-shot audio-driven human video synthesis system that generates 3D talking videos with precise lip synchronization, expressive body gestures, temporally consistent photo-realistic quality, and continuous viewpoint control. The process follows a two-stage approach. In the first stage, the system maps audio input to high-fidelity motion sequences, encompassing upper-body gestures and facial expressions. To enrich motion diversity and authenticity, large language model (LLM) priors are integrated with text-aligned semantic audio features, leveraging LLMs' cross-modal generalization power to enhance motion quality. In the second stage, we improve diffusion-based video generation models by incorporating a prior-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism: a view-guided MoE focuses on view-specific attributes, while a mask-guided MoE enhances region-based rendering stability. Additionally, a mask prediction module is devised to derive human masks from motion data, enhancing the stability and accuracy of masks and enabling mask guiding during inference. We also introduce a comprehensive human video dataset with 2,203 identities, covering diverse body gestures and detailed annotations, facilitating broad generalization. The code, data, and pre-trained models will be released for research purposes.

Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, image, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of training data with paired triplet conditions and the difficulty of collaborating the sub-tasks of subject preservation and audio-visual sync with multimodal inputs. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct a high-quality dataset with diverse and paired text, reference images, and audio. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies. For the subject preservation task, to maintain the prompt following and visual generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. For the audio-visual sync task, besides the commonly adopted audio cross-attention layer, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multimodal inputs, building on previously acquired capabilities, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a time-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG. Project Page: https://phantom-video.github.io/HuMo.

The generation and editing of audio-conditioned talking portraits guided by multimodal inputs, including text, images, and videos, remains under explored. In this paper, we present SkyReels-Audio, a unified framework for synthesizing high-fidelity and temporally coherent talking portrait videos. Built upon pretrained video diffusion transformers, our framework supports infinite-length generation and editing, while enabling diverse and controllable conditioning through multimodal inputs. We employ a hybrid curriculum learning strategy to progressively align audio with facial motion, enabling fine-grained multimodal control over long video sequences. To enhance local facial coherence, we introduce a facial mask loss and an audio-guided classifier-free guidance mechanism. A sliding-window denoising approach further fuses latent representations across temporal segments, ensuring visual fidelity and temporal consistency across extended durations and diverse identities. More importantly, we construct a dedicated data pipeline for curating high-quality triplets consisting of synchronized audio, video, and textual descriptions. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations show that SkyReels-Audio achieves superior performance in lip-sync accuracy, identity consistency, and realistic facial dynamics, particularly under complex and challenging conditions.

In this paper, we present TalkingMachines -- an efficient framework that transforms pretrained video generation models into real-time, audio-driven character animators. TalkingMachines enables natural conversational experiences by integrating an audio large language model (LLM) with our video generation foundation model. Our primary contributions include: (1) We adapt a pretrained SOTA image-to-video DiT into an audio-driven avatar generation model of 18 billion parameters; (2) We enable infinite video streaming without error accumulation through asymmetric knowledge distillation from a bidirectional teacher model into a sparse causal, autoregressive student model; (3) We design a high-throughput, low-latency inference pipeline incorporating several key engineering optimizations such as: (a) disaggregation of the DiT and VAE decoder across separate devices, (b) efficient overlap of inter-device communication and computation using CUDA streams, (c) elimination of redundant recomputations to maximize frame-generation throughput. Please see demo videos here - https://aaxwaz.github.io/TalkingMachines/

We introduce Baichuan-Audio, an end-to-end audio large language model that seamlessly integrates audio understanding and generation. It features a text-guided aligned speech generation mechanism, enabling real-time speech interaction with both comprehension and generation capabilities. Baichuan-Audio leverages a pre-trained ASR model, followed by multi-codebook discretization of speech at a frame rate of 12.5 Hz. This multi-codebook setup ensures that speech tokens retain both semantic and acoustic information. To further enhance modeling, an independent audio head is employed to process audio tokens, effectively capturing their unique characteristics. To mitigate the loss of intelligence during pre-training and preserve the original capabilities of the LLM, we propose a two-stage pre-training strategy that maintains language understanding while enhancing audio modeling. Following alignment, the model excels in real-time speech-based conversation and exhibits outstanding question-answering capabilities, demonstrating its versatility and efficiency. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance in real-time spoken dialogue and exhibits strong question-answering abilities. Our code, model and training data are available at https://github.com/baichuan-inc/Baichuan-Audio

While recent research has made significant progress in speech-driven talking face generation, the quality of the generated video still lags behind that of real recordings. One reason for this is the use of handcrafted intermediate representations like facial landmarks and 3DMM coefficients, which are designed based on human knowledge and are insufficient to precisely describe facial movements. Additionally, these methods require an external pretrained model for extracting these representations, whose performance sets an upper bound on talking face generation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method called DAE-Talker that leverages data-driven latent representations obtained from a diffusion autoencoder (DAE). DAE contains an image encoder that encodes an image into a latent vector and a DDIM image decoder that reconstructs the image from it. We train our DAE on talking face video frames and then extract their latent representations as the training target for a Conformer-based speech2latent model. This allows DAE-Talker to synthesize full video frames and produce natural head movements that align with the content of speech, rather than relying on a predetermined head pose from a template video. We also introduce pose modelling in speech2latent for pose controllability. Additionally, we propose a novel method for generating continuous video frames with the DDIM image decoder trained on individual frames, eliminating the need for modelling the joint distribution of consecutive frames directly. Our experiments show that DAE-Talker outperforms existing popular methods in lip-sync, video fidelity, and pose naturalness. We also conduct ablation studies to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed techniques and demonstrate the pose controllability of DAE-Talker.

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) to understand audio -- including non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech -- is critically important for diverse real-world applications of LLMs. In this paper, we propose Audio Flamingo, a novel audio language model with 1) strong audio understanding abilities, 2) the ability to quickly adapt to unseen tasks via in-context learning and retrieval, and 3) strong multi-turn dialogue abilities. We introduce a series of training techniques, architecture design, and data strategies to enhance our model with these abilities. Extensive evaluations across various audio understanding tasks confirm the efficacy of our method, setting new state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Audio-driven human animation technology is widely used in human-computer interaction, and the emergence of diffusion models has further advanced its development. Currently, most methods rely on multi-stage generation and intermediate representations, resulting in long inference time and issues with generation quality in specific foreground regions and audio-motion consistency. These shortcomings are primarily due to the lack of localized fine-grained supervised guidance. To address above challenges, we propose Parts-aware Audio-driven Human Animation, PAHA, a unit enhancement and guidance framework for audio-driven upper-body animation. We introduce two key methods: Parts-Aware Re-weighting (PAR) and Parts Consistency Enhancement (PCE). PAR dynamically adjusts regional training loss weights based on pose confidence scores, effectively improving visual quality. PCE constructs and trains diffusion-based regional audio-visual classifiers to improve the consistency of motion and co-speech audio. Afterwards, we design two novel inference guidance methods for the foregoing classifiers, Sequential Guidance (SG) and Differential Guidance (DG), to balance efficiency and quality respectively. Additionally, we build CNAS, the first public Chinese News Anchor Speech dataset, to advance research and validation in this field. Extensive experimental results and user studies demonstrate that PAHA significantly outperforms existing methods in audio-motion alignment and video-related evaluations. The codes and CNAS dataset will be released upon acceptance.

We present Beamforming-LLM, a system that enables users to semantically recall conversations they may have missed in multi-speaker environments. The system combines spatial audio capture using a microphone array with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to support natural language queries such as, "What did I miss when I was following the conversation on dogs?" Directional audio streams are separated using beamforming, transcribed with Whisper, and embedded into a vector database using sentence encoders. Upon receiving a user query, semantically relevant segments are retrieved, temporally aligned with non-attended segments, and summarized using a lightweight large language model (GPT-4o-mini). The result is a user-friendly interface that provides contrastive summaries, spatial context, and timestamped audio playback. This work lays the foundation for intelligent auditory memory systems and has broad applications in assistive technology, meeting summarization, and context-aware personal spatial computing.

As chatbots continue to evolve toward human-like, real-world, interactions, multimodality remains an active area of research and exploration. So far, efforts to integrate multimodality into chatbots have primarily focused on image-centric tasks, such as visual dialogue and image-based instructions, placing emphasis on the "eyes" of human perception while neglecting the "ears", namely auditory aspects. Moreover, these studies often center around static interactions that focus on discussing the modality rather than naturally incorporating it into the conversation, which limits the richness of simultaneous, dynamic engagement. Furthermore, while multimodality has been explored in multi-party and multi-session conversations, task-specific constraints have hindered its seamless integration into dynamic, natural conversations. To address these challenges, this study aims to equip chatbots with "eyes and ears" capable of more immersive interactions with humans. As part of this effort, we introduce a new multimodal conversation dataset, Multimodal Multi-Session Multi-Party Conversation (M^3C), and propose a novel multimodal conversation model featuring multimodal memory retrieval. Our model, trained on the M^3C, demonstrates the ability to seamlessly engage in long-term conversations with multiple speakers in complex, real-world-like settings, effectively processing visual and auditory inputs to understand and respond appropriately. Human evaluations highlight the model's strong performance in maintaining coherent and dynamic interactions, demonstrating its potential for advanced multimodal conversational agents.

Recent advances in Talking Head Generation (THG) have achieved impressive lip synchronization and visual quality through diffusion models; yet existing methods struggle to generate emotionally expressive portraits while preserving speaker identity. We identify three critical limitations in current emotional talking head generation: insufficient utilization of audio's inherent emotional cues, identity leakage in emotion representations, and isolated learning of emotion correlations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework dubbed as DICE-Talk, following the idea of disentangling identity with emotion, and then cooperating emotions with similar characteristics. First, we develop a disentangled emotion embedder that jointly models audio-visual emotional cues through cross-modal attention, representing emotions as identity-agnostic Gaussian distributions. Second, we introduce a correlation-enhanced emotion conditioning module with learnable Emotion Banks that explicitly capture inter-emotion relationships through vector quantization and attention-based feature aggregation. Third, we design an emotion discrimination objective that enforces affective consistency during the diffusion process through latent-space classification. Extensive experiments on MEAD and HDTF datasets demonstrate our method's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in emotion accuracy while maintaining competitive lip-sync performance. Qualitative results and user studies further confirm our method's ability to generate identity-preserving portraits with rich, correlated emotional expressions that naturally adapt to unseen identities.

Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for audio-driven character animation demonstrate promising performance for scenarios primarily involving speech and singing. However, they often fall short in more complex film and television productions, which demand sophisticated elements such as nuanced character interactions, realistic body movements, and dynamic camera work. To address this long-standing challenge of achieving film-level character animation, we propose an audio-driven model, which we refere to as Wan-S2V, built upon Wan. Our model achieves significantly enhanced expressiveness and fidelity in cinematic contexts compared to existing approaches. We conducted extensive experiments, benchmarking our method against cutting-edge models such as Hunyuan-Avatar and Omnihuman. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms these existing solutions. Additionally, we explore the versatility of our method through its applications in long-form video generation and precise video lip-sync editing.

Generating talking face videos from audio attracts lots of research interest. A few person-specific methods can generate vivid videos but require the target speaker's videos for training or fine-tuning. Existing person-generic methods have difficulty in generating realistic and lip-synced videos while preserving identity information. To tackle this problem, we propose a two-stage framework consisting of audio-to-landmark generation and landmark-to-video rendering procedures. First, we devise a novel Transformer-based landmark generator to infer lip and jaw landmarks from the audio. Prior landmark characteristics of the speaker's face are employed to make the generated landmarks coincide with the facial outline of the speaker. Then, a video rendering model is built to translate the generated landmarks into face images. During this stage, prior appearance information is extracted from the lower-half occluded target face and static reference images, which helps generate realistic and identity-preserving visual content. For effectively exploring the prior information of static reference images, we align static reference images with the target face's pose and expression based on motion fields. Moreover, auditory features are reused to guarantee that the generated face images are well synchronized with the audio. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can produce more realistic, lip-synced, and identity-preserving videos than existing person-generic talking face generation methods.

As AI chatbots become ubiquitous, voice interaction presents a compelling way to enable rapid, high-bandwidth communication for both semantic and social signals. This has driven research into Large Audio Models (LAMs) to power voice-native experiences. However, aligning LAM development with user goals requires a clear understanding of user needs and preferences to establish reliable progress metrics. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an interactive approach to evaluate LAMs and collecting 7,500 LAM interactions from 484 participants. Through topic modeling of user queries, we identify primary use cases for audio interfaces. We then analyze user preference rankings and qualitative feedback to determine which models best align with user needs. Finally, we evaluate how static benchmarks predict interactive performance - our analysis reveals no individual benchmark strongly correlates with interactive results (tau leq 0.33 for all benchmarks). While combining multiple coarse-grained features yields modest predictive power (R^2=0.30), only two out of twenty datasets on spoken question answering and age prediction show significantly positive correlations. This suggests a clear need to develop LAM evaluations that better correlate with user preferences.

Multimodal generative models have shown impressive advances with the help of powerful diffusion models. Despite the progress, generating sound solely from text poses challenges in ensuring comprehensive scene depiction and temporal alignment. Meanwhile, video-to-sound generation limits the flexibility to prioritize sound synthesis for specific objects within the scene. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel video-and-text-to-sound generation method, called ReWaS, where video serves as a conditional control for a text-to-audio generation model. Our method estimates the structural information of audio (namely, energy) from the video while receiving key content cues from a user prompt. We employ a well-performing text-to-sound model to consolidate the video control, which is much more efficient for training multimodal diffusion models with massive triplet-paired (audio-video-text) data. In addition, by separating the generative components of audio, it becomes a more flexible system that allows users to freely adjust the energy, surrounding environment, and primary sound source according to their preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our method shows superiority in terms of quality, controllability, and training efficiency. Our demo is available at https://naver-ai.github.io/rewas

Audio-Language Models (ALMs), which are trained on audio-text data, focus on the processing, understanding, and reasoning of sounds. Unlike traditional supervised learning approaches learning from predefined labels, ALMs utilize natural language as a supervision signal, which is more suitable for describing complex real-world audio recordings. ALMs demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities and can be flexibly adapted to diverse downstream tasks. These strengths not only enhance the accuracy and generalization of audio processing tasks but also promote the development of models that more closely resemble human auditory perception and comprehension. Recent advances in ALMs have positioned them at the forefront of computer audition research, inspiring a surge of efforts to advance ALM technologies. Despite rapid progress in the field of ALMs, there is still a notable lack of systematic surveys that comprehensively organize and analyze developments. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of ALMs with a focus on general audio tasks, aiming to fill this gap by providing a structured and holistic overview of ALMs. Specifically, we cover: (1) the background of computer audition and audio-language models; (2) the foundational aspects of ALMs, including prevalent network architectures, training objectives, and evaluation methods; (3) foundational pre-training and audio-language pre-training approaches; (4) task-specific fine-tuning, multi-task tuning and agent systems for downstream applications; (5) datasets and benchmarks; and (6) current challenges and future directions. Our review provides a clear technical roadmap for researchers to understand the development and future trends of existing technologies, offering valuable references for implementation in real-world scenarios.

We introduce EgoSonics, a method to generate semantically meaningful and synchronized audio tracks conditioned on silent egocentric videos. Generating audio for silent egocentric videos could open new applications in virtual reality, assistive technologies, or for augmenting existing datasets. Existing work has been limited to domains like speech, music, or impact sounds and cannot easily capture the broad range of audio frequencies found in egocentric videos. EgoSonics addresses these limitations by building on the strength of latent diffusion models for conditioned audio synthesis. We first encode and process audio and video data into a form that is suitable for generation. The encoded data is used to train our model to generate audio tracks that capture the semantics of the input video. Our proposed SyncroNet builds on top of ControlNet to provide control signals that enables temporal synchronization to the synthesized audio. Extensive evaluations show that our model outperforms existing work in audio quality, and in our newly proposed synchronization evaluation method. Furthermore, we demonstrate downstream applications of our model in improving video summarization.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims at generating facial movements that are synchronized with the driving speech, which has been widely explored recently. Existing works mostly neglect the person-specific talking style in generation, including facial expression and head pose styles. Several works intend to capture the personalities by fine-tuning modules. However, limited training data leads to the lack of vividness. In this work, we propose AdaMesh, a novel adaptive speech-driven facial animation approach, which learns the personalized talking style from a reference video of about 10 seconds and generates vivid facial expressions and head poses. Specifically, we propose mixture-of-low-rank adaptation (MoLoRA) to fine-tune the expression adapter, which efficiently captures the facial expression style. For the personalized pose style, we propose a pose adapter by building a discrete pose prior and retrieving the appropriate style embedding with a semantic-aware pose style matrix without fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, preserves the talking style in the reference video, and generates vivid facial animation. The supplementary video and code will be available at https://adamesh.github.io.

Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in mono-channel audio generation. However, when it comes to stereo audio generation, the soundscapes often have a complex scene of multiple objects and directions. Controlling stereo audio with spatial contexts remains challenging due to high data costs and unstable generative models. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to address these issues. We first construct a large-scale, simulation-based, and GPT-assisted dataset, BEWO-1M, with abundant soundscapes and descriptions even including moving and multiple sources. Beyond text modality, we have also acquired a set of images and rationally paired stereo audios through retrieval to advance multimodal generation. Existing audio generation models tend to generate rather random and indistinct spatial audio. To provide accurate guidance for Latent Diffusion Models, we introduce the SpatialSonic model utilizing spatial-aware encoders and azimuth state matrices to reveal reasonable spatial guidance. By leveraging spatial guidance, our model not only achieves the objective of generating immersive and controllable spatial audio from text but also extends to other modalities as the pioneer attempt. Finally, under fair settings, we conduct subjective and objective evaluations on simulated and real-world data to compare our approach with prevailing methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to generate spatial audio that adheres to physical rules.

While considerable progress has been made in achieving accurate lip synchronization for 3D speech-driven talking face generation, the task of incorporating expressive facial detail synthesis aligned with the speaker's speaking status remains challenging. Our goal is to directly leverage the inherent style information conveyed by human speech for generating an expressive talking face that aligns with the speaking status. In this paper, we propose AVI-Talking, an Audio-Visual Instruction system for expressive Talking face generation. This system harnesses the robust contextual reasoning and hallucination capability offered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to instruct the realistic synthesis of 3D talking faces. Instead of directly learning facial movements from human speech, our two-stage strategy involves the LLMs first comprehending audio information and generating instructions implying expressive facial details seamlessly corresponding to the speech. Subsequently, a diffusion-based generative network executes these instructions. This two-stage process, coupled with the incorporation of LLMs, enhances model interpretability and provides users with flexibility to comprehend instructions and specify desired operations or modifications. Extensive experiments showcase the effectiveness of our approach in producing vivid talking faces with expressive facial movements and consistent emotional status.

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, a on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

Emotional talking-head generation has emerged as a pivotal research area at the intersection of computer vision and multimodal artificial intelligence, with its core value lying in enhancing human-computer interaction through immersive and empathetic engagement.With the advancement of multimodal large language models, the driving signals for emotional talking-head generation has shifted from audio and video to more flexible text. However, current text-driven methods rely on predefined discrete emotion label texts, oversimplifying the dynamic complexity of real facial muscle movements and thus failing to achieve natural emotional expressiveness.This study proposes the Think-Before-Draw framework to address two key challenges: (1) In-depth semantic parsing of emotions--by innovatively introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT), abstract emotion labels are transformed into physiologically grounded facial muscle movement descriptions, enabling the mapping from high-level semantics to actionable motion features; and (2) Fine-grained expressiveness optimization--inspired by artists' portrait painting process, a progressive guidance denoising strategy is proposed, employing a "global emotion localization--local muscle control" mechanism to refine micro-expression dynamics in generated videos.Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely-used benchmarks, including MEAD and HDTF. Additionally, we collected a set of portrait images to evaluate our model's zero-shot generation capability.

We present 3DiFACE, a novel method for personalized speech-driven 3D facial animation and editing. While existing methods deterministically predict facial animations from speech, they overlook the inherent one-to-many relationship between speech and facial expressions, i.e., there are multiple reasonable facial expression animations matching an audio input. It is especially important in content creation to be able to modify generated motion or to specify keyframes. To enable stochasticity as well as motion editing, we propose a lightweight audio-conditioned diffusion model for 3D facial motion. This diffusion model can be trained on a small 3D motion dataset, maintaining expressive lip motion output. In addition, it can be finetuned for specific subjects, requiring only a short video of the person. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and yields speech-driven animations with greater fidelity and diversity.

In this paper, we consider a novel and practical case for talking face video generation. Specifically, we focus on the scenarios involving multi-people interactions, where the talking context, such as audience or surroundings, is present. In these situations, the video generation should take the context into consideration in order to generate video content naturally aligned with driving audios and spatially coherent to the context. To achieve this, we provide a two-stage and cross-modal controllable video generation pipeline, taking facial landmarks as an explicit and compact control signal to bridge the driving audio, talking context and generated videos. Inside this pipeline, we devise a 3D video diffusion model, allowing for efficient contort of both spatial conditions (landmarks and context video), as well as audio condition for temporally coherent generation. The experimental results verify the advantage of the proposed method over other baselines in terms of audio-video synchronization, video fidelity and frame consistency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in integrating diverse expert models to tackle intricate language and vision tasks. Despite their significance in advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), their potential in intelligent audio content creation remains unexplored. In this work, we tackle the problem of creating audio content with storylines encompassing speech, music, and sound effects, guided by text instructions. We present WavJourney, a system that leverages LLMs to connect various audio models for audio content generation. Given a text description of an auditory scene, WavJourney first prompts LLMs to generate a structured script dedicated to audio storytelling. The audio script incorporates diverse audio elements, organized based on their spatio-temporal relationships. As a conceptual representation of audio, the audio script provides an interactive and interpretable rationale for human engagement. Afterward, the audio script is fed into a script compiler, converting it into a computer program. Each line of the program calls a task-specific audio generation model or computational operation function (e.g., concatenate, mix). The computer program is then executed to obtain an explainable solution for audio generation. We demonstrate the practicality of WavJourney across diverse real-world scenarios, including science fiction, education, and radio play. The explainable and interactive design of WavJourney fosters human-machine co-creation in multi-round dialogues, enhancing creative control and adaptability in audio production. WavJourney audiolizes the human imagination, opening up new avenues for creativity in multimedia content creation.

Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a trigger phrase followed by a command. In this work, we explore the possibility of making these interactions more natural by eliminating the need for a trigger phrase. Our goal is to determine whether a user addressed the virtual assistant based on signals obtained from the streaming audio recorded by the device microphone. We address this task by combining 1-best hypotheses and decoder signals from an automatic speech recognition system with acoustic representations from an audio encoder as input features to a large language model (LLM). In particular, we are interested in data and resource efficient systems that require only a small amount of training data and can operate in scenarios with only a single frozen LLM available on a device. For this reason, our model is trained on 80k or less examples of multimodal data using a combination of low-rank adaptation and prefix tuning. We compare the proposed system to unimodal baselines and show that the multimodal approach achieves lower equal-error-rates (EERs), while using only a fraction of the training data. We also show that low-dimensional specialized audio representations lead to lower EERs than high-dimensional general audio representations.

Audio-driven co-speech human gesture generation has made remarkable advancements recently. However, most previous works only focus on single person audio-driven gesture generation. We aim at solving the problem of conversational co-speech gesture generation that considers multiple participants in a conversation, which is a novel and challenging task due to the difficulty of simultaneously incorporating semantic information and other relevant features from both the primary speaker and the interlocutor. To this end, we propose CoDiffuseGesture, a diffusion model-based approach for speech-driven interaction gesture generation via modeling bilateral conversational intention, emotion, and semantic context. Our method synthesizes appropriate interactive, speech-matched, high-quality gestures for conversational motions through the intention perception module and emotion reasoning module at the sentence level by a pretrained language model. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method.

While rendering and animation of photorealistic 3D human body models have matured and reached an impressive quality over the past years, modeling the spatial audio associated with such full body models has been largely ignored so far. In this work, we present a framework that allows for high-quality spatial audio generation, capable of rendering the full 3D soundfield generated by a human body, including speech, footsteps, hand-body interactions, and others. Given a basic audio-visual representation of the body in form of 3D body pose and audio from a head-mounted microphone, we demonstrate that we can render the full acoustic scene at any point in 3D space efficiently and accurately. To enable near-field and realtime rendering of sound, we borrow the idea of volumetric primitives from graphical neural rendering and transfer them into the acoustic domain. Our acoustic primitives result in an order of magnitude smaller soundfield representations and overcome deficiencies in near-field rendering compared to previous approaches.

With the growing requirement for natural human-computer interaction, speech-based systems receive increasing attention as speech is one of the most common forms of daily communication. However, the existing speech models still experience high latency when generating the first audio token during streaming, which poses a significant bottleneck for deployment. To address this issue, we propose VITA-Audio, an end-to-end large speech model with fast audio-text token generation. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Multiple Cross-modal Token Prediction (MCTP) module that efficiently generates multiple audio tokens within a single model forward pass, which not only accelerates the inference but also significantly reduces the latency for generating the first audio in streaming scenarios. In addition, a four-stage progressive training strategy is explored to achieve model acceleration with minimal loss of speech quality. To our knowledge, VITA-Audio is the first multi-modal large language model capable of generating audio output during the first forward pass, enabling real-time conversational capabilities with minimal latency. VITA-Audio is fully reproducible and is trained on open-source data only. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves an inference speedup of 3~5x at the 7B parameter scale, but also significantly outperforms open-source models of similar model size on multiple benchmarks for automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and spoken question answering (SQA) tasks.

We propose a novel 3D-aware diffusion-based method for generating photorealistic talking head videos directly from a single identity image and explicit control signals (e.g., expressions). Our method generates Multiplane Images (MPIs) that ensure geometric consistency, making them ideal for immersive viewing experiences like binocular videos for VR headsets. Unlike existing methods that often require a separate stage or joint optimization to reconstruct a 3D representation (such as NeRF or 3D Gaussians), our approach directly generates the final output through a single denoising process, eliminating the need for post-processing steps to render novel views efficiently. To effectively learn from monocular videos, we introduce a training mechanism that reconstructs the output MPI randomly in either the target or the reference camera space. This approach enables the model to simultaneously learn sharp image details and underlying 3D information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves competitive avatar quality and novel-view rendering capabilities, even without explicit 3D reconstruction or high-quality multi-view training data.

Audio-driven portrait animation, which synthesizes realistic videos from reference images using audio signals, faces significant challenges in real-time generation of high-fidelity, temporally coherent animations. While recent diffusion-based methods improve generation quality by integrating audio into denoising processes, their reliance on frame-by-frame UNet architectures introduces prohibitive latency and struggles with temporal consistency. This paper introduces MirrorMe, a real-time, controllable framework built on the LTX video model, a diffusion transformer that compresses video spatially and temporally for efficient latent space denoising. To address LTX's trade-offs between compression and semantic fidelity, we propose three innovations: 1. A reference identity injection mechanism via VAE-encoded image concatenation and self-attention, ensuring identity consistency; 2. A causal audio encoder and adapter tailored to LTX's temporal structure, enabling precise audio-expression synchronization; and 3. A progressive training strategy combining close-up facial training, half-body synthesis with facial masking, and hand pose integration for enhanced gesture control. Extensive experiments on the EMTD Benchmark demonstrate MirrorMe's state-of-the-art performance in fidelity, lip-sync accuracy, and temporal stability.

The field of portrait image animation, driven by speech audio input, has experienced significant advancements in the generation of realistic and dynamic portraits. This research delves into the complexities of synchronizing facial movements and creating visually appealing, temporally consistent animations within the framework of diffusion-based methodologies. Moving away from traditional paradigms that rely on parametric models for intermediate facial representations, our innovative approach embraces the end-to-end diffusion paradigm and introduces a hierarchical audio-driven visual synthesis module to enhance the precision of alignment between audio inputs and visual outputs, encompassing lip, expression, and pose motion. Our proposed network architecture seamlessly integrates diffusion-based generative models, a UNet-based denoiser, temporal alignment techniques, and a reference network. The proposed hierarchical audio-driven visual synthesis offers adaptive control over expression and pose diversity, enabling more effective personalization tailored to different identities. Through a comprehensive evaluation that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative analyses, our approach demonstrates obvious enhancements in image and video quality, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity. Further visualization and access to the source code can be found at: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo.

Recent advances in video diffusion models have unlocked new potential for realistic audio-driven talking video generation. However, achieving seamless audio-lip synchronization, maintaining long-term identity consistency, and producing natural, audio-aligned expressions in generated talking videos remain significant challenges. To address these challenges, we propose Memory-guided EMOtion-aware diffusion (MEMO), an end-to-end audio-driven portrait animation approach to generate identity-consistent and expressive talking videos. Our approach is built around two key modules: (1) a memory-guided temporal module, which enhances long-term identity consistency and motion smoothness by developing memory states to store information from a longer past context to guide temporal modeling via linear attention; and (2) an emotion-aware audio module, which replaces traditional cross attention with multi-modal attention to enhance audio-video interaction, while detecting emotions from audio to refine facial expressions via emotion adaptive layer norm. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that MEMO generates more realistic talking videos across diverse image and audio types, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in overall quality, audio-lip synchronization, identity consistency, and expression-emotion alignment.

Generative models have advanced rapidly, enabling impressive talking head generation that brings AI to life. However, most existing methods focus solely on one-way portrait animation. Even the few that support bidirectional conversational interactions lack precise emotion-adaptive capabilities, significantly limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose EAI-Avatar, a novel emotion-aware talking head generation framework for dyadic interactions. Leveraging the dialogue generation capability of large language models (LLMs, e.g., GPT-4), our method produces temporally consistent virtual avatars with rich emotional variations that seamlessly transition between speaking and listening states. Specifically, we design a Transformer-based head mask generator that learns temporally consistent motion features in a latent mask space, capable of generating arbitrary-length, temporally consistent mask sequences to constrain head motions. Furthermore, we introduce an interactive talking tree structure to represent dialogue state transitions, where each tree node contains information such as child/parent/sibling nodes and the current character's emotional state. By performing reverse-level traversal, we extract rich historical emotional cues from the current node to guide expression synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and effectiveness of our method.

Talking head generation is a significant research topic that still faces numerous challenges. Previous works often adopt generative adversarial networks or regression models, which are plagued by generation quality and average facial shape problem. Although diffusion models show impressive generative ability, their exploration in talking head generation remains unsatisfactory. This is because they either solely use the diffusion model to obtain an intermediate representation and then employ another pre-trained renderer, or they overlook the feature decoupling of complex facial details, such as expressions, head poses and appearance textures. Therefore, we propose a Facial Decoupled Diffusion model for Talking head generation called FD2Talk, which fully leverages the advantages of diffusion models and decouples the complex facial details through multi-stages. Specifically, we separate facial details into motion and appearance. In the initial phase, we design the Diffusion Transformer to accurately predict motion coefficients from raw audio. These motions are highly decoupled from appearance, making them easier for the network to learn compared to high-dimensional RGB images. Subsequently, in the second phase, we encode the reference image to capture appearance textures. The predicted facial and head motions and encoded appearance then serve as the conditions for the Diffusion UNet, guiding the frame generation. Benefiting from decoupling facial details and fully leveraging diffusion models, extensive experiments substantiate that our approach excels in enhancing image quality and generating more accurate and diverse results compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Current audio-driven facial animation methods achieve impressive results for short videos but suffer from error accumulation and identity drift when extended to longer durations. Existing methods attempt to mitigate this through external spatial control, increasing long-term consistency but compromising the naturalness of motion. We propose KeyFace, a novel two-stage diffusion-based framework, to address these issues. In the first stage, keyframes are generated at a low frame rate, conditioned on audio input and an identity frame, to capture essential facial expressions and movements over extended periods of time. In the second stage, an interpolation model fills in the gaps between keyframes, ensuring smooth transitions and temporal coherence. To further enhance realism, we incorporate continuous emotion representations and handle a wide range of non-speech vocalizations (NSVs), such as laughter and sighs. We also introduce two new evaluation metrics for assessing lip synchronization and NSV generation. Experimental results show that KeyFace outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generating natural, coherent facial animations over extended durations, successfully encompassing NSVs and continuous emotions.

Imagine being in a crowded space where people speak a different language and having hearables that transform the auditory space into your native language, while preserving the spatial cues for all speakers. We introduce spatial speech translation, a novel concept for hearables that translate speakers in the wearer's environment, while maintaining the direction and unique voice characteristics of each speaker in the binaural output. To achieve this, we tackle several technical challenges spanning blind source separation, localization, real-time expressive translation, and binaural rendering to preserve the speaker directions in the translated audio, while achieving real-time inference on the Apple M2 silicon. Our proof-of-concept evaluation with a prototype binaural headset shows that, unlike existing models, which fail in the presence of interference, we achieve a BLEU score of up to 22.01 when translating between languages, despite strong interference from other speakers in the environment. User studies further confirm the system's effectiveness in spatially rendering the translated speech in previously unseen real-world reverberant environments. Taking a step back, this work marks the first step towards integrating spatial perception into speech translation.

Dialogue serves as the most natural manner of human-computer interaction (HCI). Recent advancements in speech language models (SLM) have significantly enhanced speech-based conversational AI. However, these models are limited to turn-based conversation, lacking the ability to interact with humans in real-time spoken scenarios, for example, being interrupted when the generated content is not satisfactory. To address these limitations, we explore full duplex modeling (FDM) in interactive speech language models (iSLM), focusing on enhancing real-time interaction and, more explicitly, exploring the quintessential ability of interruption. We introduce a novel model design, namely listening-while-speaking language model (LSLM), an end-to-end system equipped with both listening and speaking channels. Our LSLM employs a token-based decoder-only TTS for speech generation and a streaming self-supervised learning (SSL) encoder for real-time audio input. LSLM fuses both channels for autoregressive generation and detects turn-taking in real time. Three fusion strategies -- early fusion, middle fusion, and late fusion -- are explored, with middle fusion achieving an optimal balance between speech generation and real-time interaction. Two experimental settings, command-based FDM and voice-based FDM, demonstrate LSLM's robustness to noise and sensitivity to diverse instructions. Our results highlight LSLM's capability to achieve duplex communication with minimal impact on existing systems. This study aims to advance the development of interactive speech dialogue systems, enhancing their applicability in real-world contexts.