new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Nov 13

Xemo-Talker: Unlock Emotions Explicitly for Audio-Driven Talking Portrait Synthesis

Precise emotion control in audio-driven talking heads remains a challenge due to the reliance on implicit emotion regulation in existing systems, which often leads to indirect and insufficient control. Additionally, training with explicit emotion-related losses across the entire motion space poses significant difficulties due to the inherent trade-off between accurate lip synchronization and fine-grained emotion control. In this paper, we reveal a key finding: although emotional cues are distributed throughout the motion space, concentrating discriminative supervision on less-principal components achieves a better emotion-lip synchronization balance, as principal components mainly encode high-energy articulation and pose variations. Building on this insight, we propose Xemo-Talker, which first learns a neutral speech-to-motion mapping for stable articulation and lip synchronization, and then introduces a lightweight emotion branch guided by less-principal subspace supervision. To enhance emotion control, we design a Tri-Loss consisting of inter-class separation, intra-class compactness, and less-principal contrastive learning. Given an audio input, a reference image, and an emotion label, Xemo-Talker achieves state-of-the-art emotion classification accuracy while maintaining competitive lip synchronization and high inference efficiency, with performance approaching that measured on real videos.The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/chaolongy/Xemo-Talker.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 9

StyleTalker: One-shot Style-based Audio-driven Talking Head Video Generation

We propose StyleTalker, a novel audio-driven talking head generation model that can synthesize a video of a talking person from a single reference image with accurately audio-synced lip shapes, realistic head poses, and eye blinks. Specifically, by leveraging a pretrained image generator and an image encoder, we estimate the latent codes of the talking head video that faithfully reflects the given audio. This is made possible with several newly devised components: 1) A contrastive lip-sync discriminator for accurate lip synchronization, 2) A conditional sequential variational autoencoder that learns the latent motion space disentangled from the lip movements, such that we can independently manipulate the motions and lip movements while preserving the identity. 3) An auto-regressive prior augmented with normalizing flow to learn a complex audio-to-motion multi-modal latent space. Equipped with these components, StyleTalker can generate talking head videos not only in a motion-controllable way when another motion source video is given but also in a completely audio-driven manner by inferring realistic motions from the input audio. Through extensive experiments and user studies, we show that our model is able to synthesize talking head videos with impressive perceptual quality which are accurately lip-synced with the input audios, largely outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 14, 2024

Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue

An avatar that holds a conversation should decide what to say and to move while saying it, yet these abilities live in separate model families: spoken dialogue models produce speech without motion, and co-speech motion models produce motion only from audio handed to them. The standard remedy is a cascade that first generates the spoken response and then runs a motion model over the finished audio, which requires a second full inference pass and precludes any joint optimisation between the two. We present Motion-Omni, an end-to-end framework in which a spoken dialogue model natively outputs explicit facial expression together with hand, upper-body and lower-body motion, generated directly from the hidden states that produce the speech. Joint training is not optional here: with the speech pathway frozen, motion remains misaligned with the audio, and co-adapting the LLM, Speech Generator and Motion Generator under both objectives is what recovers alignment while retaining spoken-dialogue ability. Supervision comes from a scalable, model-agnostic pipeline that pseudo-labels consistent-voice speech responses with a replaceable motion teacher, yielding 422,856 quality-ranked pairs (1,402 hours). We further release SwDA-500 and, to our knowledge, the first public evaluation protocol for stochastic open-ended full-body spoken dialogue, matching audio across motion systems while unifying rendering, automatic metrics, human evaluation, and latency measurement. Instantiated with a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbone, Motion-Omni-Q7 matches the same-audio teacher cascade to within 2% on reference-free motion metrics while responding 5.4 x faster (RTF=0.78, faster than real time), surpasses all non-teacher cascades on beat correlation and diversity, and reaches a 2.62% word error rate, the lowest among the omni-modal systems compared.

ConsistTalk: Intensity Controllable Temporally Consistent Talking Head Generation with Diffusion Noise Search

Recent advancements in video diffusion models have significantly enhanced audio-driven portrait animation. However, current methods still suffer from flickering, identity drift, and poor audio-visual synchronization. These issues primarily stem from entangled appearance-motion representations and unstable inference strategies. In this paper, we introduce ConsistTalk, a novel intensity-controllable and temporally consistent talking head generation framework with diffusion noise search inference. First, we propose an optical flow-guided temporal module (OFT) that decouples motion features from static appearance by leveraging facial optical flow, thereby reducing visual flicker and improving temporal consistency. Second, we present an Audio-to-Intensity (A2I) model obtained through multimodal teacher-student knowledge distillation. By transforming audio and facial velocity features into a frame-wise intensity sequence, the A2I model enables joint modeling of audio and visual motion, resulting in more natural dynamics. This further enables fine-grained, frame-wise control of motion dynamics while maintaining tight audio-visual synchronization. Third, we introduce a diffusion noise initialization strategy (IC-Init). By enforcing explicit constraints on background coherence and motion continuity during inference-time noise search, we achieve better identity preservation and refine motion dynamics compared to the current autoregressive strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistTalk significantly outperforms prior methods in reducing flicker, preserving identity, and delivering temporally stable, high-fidelity talking head videos.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025

ARIG: Autoregressive Interactive Head Generation for Real-time Conversations

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025 1

UniLS: End-to-End Audio-Driven Avatars for Unified Listening and Speaking

Generating lifelike conversational avatars requires modeling not just isolated speakers, but the dynamic, reciprocal interaction of speaking and listening. However, modeling the listener is exceptionally challenging: direct audio-driven training fails, producing stiff, static listening motions. This failure stems from a fundamental imbalance: the speaker's motion is strongly driven by speech audio, while the listener's motion primarily follows an internal motion prior and is only loosely guided by external speech. This challenge has led most methods to focus on speak-only generation. The only prior attempt at joint generation relies on extra speaker's motion to produce the listener. This design is not end-to-end, thereby hindering the real-time applicability. To address this limitation, we present UniLS, the first end-to-end framework for generating unified speak-listen expressions, driven by only dual-track audio. Our method introduces a novel two-stage training paradigm. Stage 1 first learns the internal motion prior by training an audio-free autoregressive generator, capturing the spontaneous dynamics of natural facial motion. Stage 2 then introduces the dual-track audio, fine-tuning the generator to modulate the learned motion prior based on external speech cues. Extensive evaluations show UniLS achieves state-of-the-art speaking accuracy. More importantly, it delivers up to 44.1\% improvement in listening metrics, generating significantly more diverse and natural listening expressions. This effectively mitigates the stiffness problem and provides a practical, high-fidelity audio-driven solution for interactive digital humans.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 10, 2025

MotionGPT3: Human Motion as a Second Modality

Though recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated strong capabilities and opportunities in unified understanding and generation, the development of unified motion-language models remains underexplored. To enable such models with high-fidelity human motion, two core challenges must be addressed. The first is the reconstruction gap between the continuous motion modality and discrete representation in an autoregressive manner, and the second is the degradation of language intelligence during unified training. Inspired by the mixture of experts, we propose MotionGPT3, a bimodal motion-language model that treats human motion as a second modality, decoupling motion modeling via separate model parameters and enabling both effective cross-modal interaction and efficient multimodal scaling training. To preserve language intelligence, the text branch retains the original structure and parameters of the pretrained language model, while a new motion branch is integrated via a shared attention mechanism, enabling bidirectional information flow between two modalities. We first employ a motion Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to encode raw human motion into latent representations. Based on this continuous latent space, the motion branch predicts motion latents directly from intermediate hidden states using a diffusion head, bypassing discrete tokenization. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves competitive performance on both motion understanding and generation tasks while preserving strong language capabilities, establishing a unified bimodal motion diffusion framework within an autoregressive manner.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025

TalkVerse: Democratizing Minute-Long Audio-Driven Video Generation

We introduce TalkVerse, a large-scale, open corpus for single-person, audio-driven talking video generation designed to enable fair, reproducible comparison across methods. While current state-of-the-art systems rely on closed data or compute-heavy models, TalkVerse offers 2.3 million high-resolution (720p/1080p) audio-video synchronized clips totaling 6.3k hours. These are curated from over 60k hours of video via a transparent pipeline that includes scene-cut detection, aesthetic assessment, strict audio-visual synchronization checks, and comprehensive annotations including 2D skeletons and structured visual/audio-style captions. Leveraging TalkVerse, we present a reproducible 5B DiT baseline built on Wan2.2-5B. By utilizing a video VAE with a high downsampling ratio and a sliding window mechanism with motion-frame context, our model achieves minute-long generation with low drift. It delivers comparable lip-sync and visual quality to the 14B Wan-S2V model but with 10times lower inference cost. To enhance storytelling in long videos, we integrate an MLLM director to rewrite prompts based on audio and visual cues. Furthermore, our model supports zero-shot video dubbing via controlled latent noise injection. We open-source the dataset, training recipes, and 5B checkpoints to lower barriers for research in audio-driven human video generation. Project Page: https://zhenzhiwang.github.io/talkverse/

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025

DAE-Talker: High Fidelity Speech-Driven Talking Face Generation with Diffusion Autoencoder

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 30, 2023

Beyond Two Tracks: Speaker-Anchored Full-Duplex Dialogue Recovery

Spoken interaction is moving from alternating turns to full-duplex conversation, where an agent listens while speaking. Learning this coordination requires natural dialogue with persistent speaker-resolved tracks, a data requirement that remains difficult to satisfy at scale. Generative recovery offers a route from ordinary recordings, but recovering two voices is not enough: their track assignments can drift as the conversation unfolds. We address this missing link with speaker-anchored routing before diffusion: a 1.84M-parameter module matches the separator's coarse streams to fixed enrollment identities and orders them before a frozen generator reconstructs the speech, without retraining the generator or altering the reconstructed audio. On 25-minute remote conversations, routing cuts wrong-track time from 43.9% to 4.1%, below the 6.2% of matched-enrollment waveform re-identification, with its largest advantage when one participant holds the floor (17.8% versus 28.6%), and raises fixed-track activity F1 from 0.46 to 0.84 while per-chunk reconstruction quality is unchanged. The same router transfers to unseen face-to-face and telephone recordings, and a margin-gated verification step brings their wrong-track time to 0.9-1.7% while embedding 20-36% of the output, where full re-identification embeds all of it. Recovered voices thus become the participant-consistent tracks that full-duplex dialogue modeling needs. Audio examples: https://elpsykongloo.github.io/beyond-two-tracks/

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 18

ViBES: A Conversational Agent with Behaviorally-Intelligent 3D Virtual Body

Human communication is inherently multimodal and social: words, prosody, and body language jointly carry intent. Yet most prior systems model human behavior as a translation task co-speech gesture or text-to-motion that maps a fixed utterance to motion clips-without requiring agentic decision-making about when to move, what to do, or how to adapt across multi-turn dialogue. This leads to brittle timing, weak social grounding, and fragmented stacks where speech, text, and motion are trained or inferred in isolation. We introduce ViBES (Voice in Behavioral Expression and Synchrony), a conversational 3D agent that jointly plans language and movement and executes dialogue-conditioned body actions. Concretely, ViBES is a speech-language-behavior (SLB) model with a mixture-of-modality-experts (MoME) backbone: modality-partitioned transformer experts for speech, facial expression, and body motion. The model processes interleaved multimodal token streams with hard routing by modality (parameters are split per expert), while sharing information through cross-expert attention. By leveraging strong pretrained speech-language models, the agent supports mixed-initiative interaction: users can speak, type, or issue body-action directives mid-conversation, and the system exposes controllable behavior hooks for streaming responses. We further benchmark on multi-turn conversation with automatic metrics of dialogue-motion alignment and behavior quality, and observe consistent gains over strong co-speech and text-to-motion baselines. ViBES goes beyond "speech-conditioned motion generation" toward agentic virtual bodies where language, prosody, and movement are jointly generated, enabling controllable, socially competent 3D interaction. Code and data will be made available at: ai.stanford.edu/~juze/ViBES/

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025

Mitigating Error Accumulation in Co-Speech Motion Generation via Global Rotation Diffusion and Multi-Level Constraints

Reliable co-speech motion generation requires precise motion representation and consistent structural priors across all joints. Existing generative methods typically operate on local joint rotations, which are defined hierarchically based on the skeleton structure. This leads to cumulative errors during generation, manifesting as unstable and implausible motions at end-effectors. In this work, we propose GlobalDiff, a diffusion-based framework that operates directly in the space of global joint rotations for the first time, fundamentally decoupling each joint's prediction from upstream dependencies and alleviating hierarchical error accumulation. To compensate for the absence of structural priors in global rotation space, we introduce a multi-level constraint scheme. Specifically, a joint structure constraint introduces virtual anchor points around each joint to better capture fine-grained orientation. A skeleton structure constraint enforces angular consistency across bones to maintain structural integrity. A temporal structure constraint utilizes a multi-scale variational encoder to align the generated motion with ground-truth temporal patterns. These constraints jointly regularize the global diffusion process and reinforce structural awareness. Extensive evaluations on standard co-speech benchmarks show that GlobalDiff generates smooth and accurate motions, improving the performance by 46.0 % compared to the current SOTA under multiple speaker identities.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 5

PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024

Priority-Centric Human Motion Generation in Discrete Latent Space

Text-to-motion generation is a formidable task, aiming to produce human motions that align with the input text while also adhering to human capabilities and physical laws. While there have been advancements in diffusion models, their application in discrete spaces remains underexplored. Current methods often overlook the varying significance of different motions, treating them uniformly. It is essential to recognize that not all motions hold the same relevance to a particular textual description. Some motions, being more salient and informative, should be given precedence during generation. In response, we introduce a Priority-Centric Motion Discrete Diffusion Model (M2DM), which utilizes a Transformer-based VQ-VAE to derive a concise, discrete motion representation, incorporating a global self-attention mechanism and a regularization term to counteract code collapse. We also present a motion discrete diffusion model that employs an innovative noise schedule, determined by the significance of each motion token within the entire motion sequence. This approach retains the most salient motions during the reverse diffusion process, leading to more semantically rich and varied motions. Additionally, we formulate two strategies to gauge the importance of motion tokens, drawing from both textual and visual indicators. Comprehensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets confirm that our model surpasses existing techniques in fidelity and diversity, particularly for intricate textual descriptions.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

FaceTalk: Audio-Driven Motion Diffusion for Neural Parametric Head Models

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023

Predicting Turn-Taking Outcomes in Multi-Party Conversation: Interpretable Modelling of Speech and Gaze Dynamics with Interpersonal Closeness

Smooth speaker transitions are fundamental to effective conversation and rely on an interlocutor's ability to predict when to enter the conversation. This ability depends on accurately interpreting and expressing the verbal and non-verbal cues that signal when a speaker wishes to take or relinquish the floor. The process becomes even more complex in noisy, natural, multi-party settings, with multiple interlocutors available. This study models how gaze and speech, together with perceived interpersonal closeness, signal conversational floor changes in free four-person dialogue. Using the GaMMA corpus, we trained logistic regression models using interpretable, behaviourally motivated features extracted before each turn-taking event to classify floor-transfer outcomes as gaps or overlaps. Predictors included gaze features such as transition motifs and behavioural contrasts, entropy, gaze-based addressee identity, and mutual gaze, alongside speech features derived from speaker loudness, as well as perceived interpersonal closeness (IOS) between speakers. Results show that gaze features capture predictive structure, and that combining them with loudness improves performance (ROC AUC = 0.76 +- 0.04). Loudness reflected speaker control, while gaze dispersion and addressing indexed listener readiness and competitive entry. Performance remained robust across noise conditions, indicating that gaze provides a complementary, noise-resilient cue to turn-taking dynamics.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 27

Ditto: Motion-Space Diffusion for Controllable Realtime Talking Head Synthesis

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 29, 2024 2

LaMP: Language-Motion Pretraining for Motion Generation, Retrieval, and Captioning

Language plays a vital role in the realm of human motion. Existing methods have largely depended on CLIP text embeddings for motion generation, yet they fall short in effectively aligning language and motion due to CLIP's pretraining on static image-text pairs. This work introduces LaMP, a novel Language-Motion Pretraining model, which transitions from a language-vision to a more suitable language-motion latent space. It addresses key limitations by generating motion-informative text embeddings, significantly enhancing the relevance and semantics of generated motion sequences. With LaMP, we advance three key tasks: text-to-motion generation, motion-text retrieval, and motion captioning through aligned language-motion representation learning. For generation, we utilize LaMP to provide the text condition instead of CLIP, and an autoregressive masked prediction is designed to achieve mask modeling without rank collapse in transformers. For retrieval, motion features from LaMP's motion transformer interact with query tokens to retrieve text features from the text transformer, and vice versa. For captioning, we finetune a large language model with the language-informative motion features to develop a strong motion captioning model. In addition, we introduce the LaMP-BertScore metric to assess the alignment of generated motions with textual descriptions. Extensive experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods across all three tasks. The code of our method will be made public.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splatting

Radiance fields have demonstrated impressive performance in synthesizing lifelike 3D talking heads. However, due to the difficulty in fitting steep appearance changes, the prevailing paradigm that presents facial motions by directly modifying point appearance may lead to distortions in dynamic regions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce TalkingGaussian, a deformation-based radiance fields framework for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. Leveraging the point-based Gaussian Splatting, facial motions can be represented in our method by applying smooth and continuous deformations to persistent Gaussian primitives, without requiring to learn the difficult appearance change like previous methods. Due to this simplification, precise facial motions can be synthesized while keeping a highly intact facial feature. Under such a deformation paradigm, we further identify a face-mouth motion inconsistency that would affect the learning of detailed speaking motions. To address this conflict, we decompose the model into two branches separately for the face and inside mouth areas, therefore simplifying the learning tasks to help reconstruct more accurate motion and structure of the mouth region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method renders high-quality lip-synchronized talking head videos, with better facial fidelity and higher efficiency compared with previous methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024

TellWhisper: Tell Whisper Who Speaks When

Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MASR) aims to predict ''who spoke when and what'' from multi-speaker speech, a key technology for multi-party dialogue understanding. However, most existing approaches decouple temporal modeling and speaker modeling when addressing ''when'' and ''who'': some inject speaker cues before encoding (e.g., speaker masking), which can cause irreversible information loss; others fuse identity by mixing speaker posteriors after encoding, which may entangle acoustic content with speaker identity. This separation is brittle under rapid turn-taking and overlapping speech, often leading to degraded performance. To address these limitations, we propose TellWhisper, a unified framework that jointly models speaker identity and temporal within the speech encoder. Specifically, we design TS-RoPE, a time-speaker rotary positional encoding: time coordinates are derived from frame indices, while speaker coordinates are derived from speaker activity and pause cues. By applying region-specific rotation angles, the model explicitly captures per-speaker continuity, speaker-turn transitions, and state dynamics, enabling the attention mechanism to simultaneously attend to ''when'' and ''who''. Moreover, to estimate frame-level speaker activity, we develop Hyper-SD, which casts speaker classification in hyperbolic space to enhance inter-class separation and refine speaker-activity estimates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 7

Voice-Light: A Full-Duplex Cascaded Voice Agent with Causal Turn-Taking and Speculative Generation

Natural spoken interaction requires more than streaming ASR, language generation, and speech synthesis: a system must react to overlap without canceling on every acknowledgment, prepare a response before a turn is certain, and ensure canceled audio cannot enter conversation history. We present Voice-Light, a full-duplex cascaded voice agent that combines immediate acoustic onset, a causal adapter sharing a streaming ASR encoder, reversible playback control, and private speculative response generation. Structured tool calls execute concurrently with audible bridge speech, while browser acknowledgments make rendered audio authoritative for durable history. Locked evaluation on 1,673 real-conversation silence candidates found that an earlier learned completion checkpoint preserved a 2.70% false-cutoff rate but reached only 12.53% end-of-turn recall, compared with 95.60% for a Silero timing policy. The deployed system therefore retains a hybrid controller rather than claiming a learned-policy replacement. Across three unscripted operator-run microphone sessions, 36 measured response turns had a 758 ms median from final VAD endpoint to first server audio; 21 turns were below 800 ms. These sessions are an instrumented case study, not a controlled user evaluation. We release the synthetic data, model artifacts, evaluation code and summaries, source code, and deployment configuration supporting the result.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 16

BAMM: Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model

Generating human motion from text has been dominated by denoising motion models either through diffusion or generative masking process. However, these models face great limitations in usability by requiring prior knowledge of the motion length. Conversely, autoregressive motion models address this limitation by adaptively predicting motion endpoints, at the cost of degraded generation quality and editing capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model (BAMM), a novel text-to-motion generation framework. BAMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a masked self-attention transformer that autoregressively predicts randomly masked tokens via a hybrid attention masking strategy. By unifying generative masked modeling and autoregressive modeling, BAMM captures rich and bidirectional dependencies among motion tokens, while learning the probabilistic mapping from textual inputs to motion outputs with dynamically-adjusted motion sequence length. This feature enables BAMM to simultaneously achieving high-quality motion generation with enhanced usability and built-in motion editability. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that BAMM surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measures. Our project page is available at https://exitudio.github.io/BAMM-page

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

Teller: Real-Time Streaming Audio-Driven Portrait Animation with Autoregressive Motion Generation

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

MotionCLR: Motion Generation and Training-free Editing via Understanding Attention Mechanisms

This research delves into the problem of interactive editing of human motion generation. Previous motion diffusion models lack explicit modeling of the word-level text-motion correspondence and good explainability, hence restricting their fine-grained editing ability. To address this issue, we propose an attention-based motion diffusion model, namely MotionCLR, with CLeaR modeling of attention mechanisms. Technically, MotionCLR models the in-modality and cross-modality interactions with self-attention and cross-attention, respectively. More specifically, the self-attention mechanism aims to measure the sequential similarity between frames and impacts the order of motion features. By contrast, the cross-attention mechanism works to find the fine-grained word-sequence correspondence and activate the corresponding timesteps in the motion sequence. Based on these key properties, we develop a versatile set of simple yet effective motion editing methods via manipulating attention maps, such as motion (de-)emphasizing, in-place motion replacement, and example-based motion generation, etc. For further verification of the explainability of the attention mechanism, we additionally explore the potential of action-counting and grounded motion generation ability via attention maps. Our experimental results show that our method enjoys good generation and editing ability with good explainability.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 2

MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Space

Recent advances in diffusion and flow models have substantially improved text-driven human motion generation. Yet most methods generate in low-dimensional, temporally downsampled latent spaces learned primarily for reconstruction, a bottleneck that can limit generation quality and preclude direct manipulation of individual frames and joints. We introduce MotionSpaceFlow (MSFlow), a representation-aware flow-matching framework that predicts clean motion directly in continuous motion space without a learned encoder or decoder. To account for the anisotropic structure of direct motion representations, we propose representation-aware noise scaling and show how the initial Gaussian source scale governs the covariance of intermediate probability-path marginals. We further introduce a Representation-Aware Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (RA-MMDiT), which jointly updates token-level language and full-resolution motion features through joint attention while adapting temporal information flow to the motion representation: causal attention for incremental features defined by frame-to-frame changes, and bidirectional attention for global features such as absolute joint coordinates. Across different datasets and motion representations, MSFlow achieves state-of-the-art text-to-motion performance. Its global representation variant additionally enables zero-shot, inference-time control over any joint or frame through projection sampling without control-conditioned training, delivering leading motion quality with exact constraint satisfaction.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 27

DuplexSLA: A Full-Duplex Spoken Language Model with Synchronized Speech, Language, and Action

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models have shifted from turn-based to full-duplex designs, where the model continuously listens to the user while generating responses. However, existing duplex backbones still lack a native channel for in-conversation planning and tool calling, leaving real-time agentic behaviour either tied to turn boundaries or relegated to an external cascade. We propose DuplexSLA, a native full-duplex Speech-Language-Action foundation model that decodes assistant audio together with a structured action stream on a shared 160 ms chunk timeline. DuplexSLA is built on a dual-stream three-channel formulation: a continuous user audio channel, a discrete assistant audio channel, and a rate-limited textual action channel, all decoded jointly by a single backbone, so that listening, speaking, planning, and tool calling unfold on one shared clock. Two capabilities define the model: (1) semantic-driven turn-taking control, where interruption, pause, and backchannel are handled inside the same backbone instead of by an external semantic VAD; and (2) in-conversation planning and tool calling, where planning text and structured tool calls are emitted on the action channel without halting assistant audio, so that multi-action and backchannel-triggered tool use are interleaved with ongoing speech. To evaluate these capabilities together, we further construct DuplexSLA-Bench, a duplex benchmark covering pause, interrupt, and backchannel turn-taking together with three styles of in-conversation tool calling. Our project page, interactive demos, and the DuplexSLA-Bench evaluation suite are publicly available at https://github.com/hyzhang24/DuplexSLA.

  • 16 authors
·
Jun 10

One-shot Talking Face Generation from Single-speaker Audio-Visual Correlation Learning

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 5, 2021

PersonaGesture: Single-Reference Co-Speech Gesture Personalization for Unseen Speakers

We propose PersonaGesture, a diffusion-based pipeline for single-reference co-speech gesture personalization of unseen speakers. Given target speech and one motion clip from a new speaker, the model must synthesize gestures that follow the new utterance while retaining speaker-specific pose choices, without per-speaker optimization. This setting is useful for avatars and virtual agents, but it is hard because the reference mixes stable speaker habits with utterance-specific trajectories. PersonaGesture consists of two key components, Adaptive Style Infusion (ASI) and Implicit Distribution Rectification (IDR), to separate temporal identity evidence from residual statistic correction. A Style Perceiver first encodes the variable-length reference into compact speaker-memory tokens. ASI injects these tokens into denoising through zero-initialized residual cross-attention, enabling style evidence to affect motion formation without replacing the pretrained speech-to-motion prior. Building on this, IDR applies a length-aware diagonal affine map in latent space to correct residual channel-wise moments estimated from the same reference. Across BEAT2 and ZeroEGGS, we evaluate quantitative metrics, reference-identity controls, same-audio diagnostics, qualitative comparisons, and human preference. Experiments show that separating denoising-time speaker memory from conservative post-generation moment correction improves unseen-speaker personalization over collapsed style codes, full-reference attention, and one-clip finetuning. Project: https://xiangyue-zhang.github.io/PersonaGesture.

  • 9 authors
·
May 6

Speech2Lip: High-fidelity Speech to Lip Generation by Learning from a Short Video

Synthesizing realistic videos according to a given speech is still an open challenge. Previous works have been plagued by issues such as inaccurate lip shape generation and poor image quality. The key reason is that only motions and appearances on limited facial areas (e.g., lip area) are mainly driven by the input speech. Therefore, directly learning a mapping function from speech to the entire head image is prone to ambiguity, particularly when using a short video for training. We thus propose a decomposition-synthesis-composition framework named Speech to Lip (Speech2Lip) that disentangles speech-sensitive and speech-insensitive motion/appearance to facilitate effective learning from limited training data, resulting in the generation of natural-looking videos. First, given a fixed head pose (i.e., canonical space), we present a speech-driven implicit model for lip image generation which concentrates on learning speech-sensitive motion and appearance. Next, to model the major speech-insensitive motion (i.e., head movement), we introduce a geometry-aware mutual explicit mapping (GAMEM) module that establishes geometric mappings between different head poses. This allows us to paste generated lip images at the canonical space onto head images with arbitrary poses and synthesize talking videos with natural head movements. In addition, a Blend-Net and a contrastive sync loss are introduced to enhance the overall synthesis performance. Quantitative and qualitative results on three benchmarks demonstrate that our model can be trained by a video of just a few minutes in length and achieve state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and speech-visual synchronization. Code: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Speech2Lip.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 9, 2023

Semantic Gesticulator: Semantics-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis

In this work, we present Semantic Gesticulator, a novel framework designed to synthesize realistic gestures accompanying speech with strong semantic correspondence. Semantically meaningful gestures are crucial for effective non-verbal communication, but such gestures often fall within the long tail of the distribution of natural human motion. The sparsity of these movements makes it challenging for deep learning-based systems, trained on moderately sized datasets, to capture the relationship between the movements and the corresponding speech semantics. To address this challenge, we develop a generative retrieval framework based on a large language model. This framework efficiently retrieves suitable semantic gesture candidates from a motion library in response to the input speech. To construct this motion library, we summarize a comprehensive list of commonly used semantic gestures based on findings in linguistics, and we collect a high-quality motion dataset encompassing both body and hand movements. We also design a novel GPT-based model with strong generalization capabilities to audio, capable of generating high-quality gestures that match the rhythm of speech. Furthermore, we propose a semantic alignment mechanism to efficiently align the retrieved semantic gestures with the GPT's output, ensuring the naturalness of the final animation. Our system demonstrates robustness in generating gestures that are rhythmically coherent and semantically explicit, as evidenced by a comprehensive collection of examples. User studies confirm the quality and human-likeness of our results, and show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in terms of semantic appropriateness by a clear margin.

  • 7 authors
·
May 16, 2024

MotionAdapter: Video Motion Transfer via Content-Aware Attention Customization

Recent advances in diffusion-based text-to-video models, particularly those built on the diffusion transformer architecture, have achieved remarkable progress in generating high-quality and temporally coherent videos. However, transferring complex motions between videos remains challenging. In this work, we present MotionAdapter, a content-aware motion transfer framework that enables robust and semantically aligned motion transfer within DiT-based T2V models. Our key insight is that effective motion transfer requires \romannumeral1) explicit disentanglement of motion from appearance and \romannumeral 2) adaptive customization of motion to target content. MotionAdapter first isolates motion by analyzing cross-frame attention within 3D full-attention modules to extract attention-derived motion fields. To bridge the semantic gap between reference and target videos, we further introduce a DINO-guided motion customization module that rearranges and refines motion fields based on content correspondences. The customized motion field is then used to guide the DiT denoising process, ensuring that the synthesized video inherits the reference motion while preserving target appearance and semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionAdapter outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Moreover, MotionAdapter naturally supports complex motion transfer and motion editing tasks such as zooming.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 5

AnyTalk: Speech Animation for Arbitrary Characters Leveraging a Video Generation Model

We present AnyTalk, a novel method for generating 3D speech animations for arbitrary characters without requiring any animation data. While existing audio-driven 3D speech animation methods rely on character-specific training data or laborious rigging/re-meshing, AnyTalk circumvents these limitations by leveraging recent video diffusion models trained on extensive video datasets. We first adapt a pre-trained video diffusion model to a target character through our Character-specific Fine-tuning (CsF) technique. By fine-tuning on rendered images of the 3D character paired with zeroed-out audio embeddings (representing "no motion"), we eliminate the need for animation data while preserving the motion prior of large-scale video diffusion model. We then uplift the resulting talking-head video into a 3D speech animation by estimating blendshape parameters through a proposed optimization process. AnyTalk enables lip-synced animations across diverse face meshes and blendshape configurations, significantly reducing manual effort and data requirements. We further enhance usability by distilling AnyTalk into a streamlined network, AnyTalk_{RT}, thereby enabling real-time performance. By leveraging talking-head video generation, our method broadens access to audio-driven speech animation technology for arbitrary characters. The code is publicly available at https://serin-yoon.github.io/projects/anytalk/.

KAIST KAIST
·
Aug 16 2

Make Your Actor Talk: Generalizable and High-Fidelity Lip Sync with Motion and Appearance Disentanglement

We aim to edit the lip movements in talking video according to the given speech while preserving the personal identity and visual details. The task can be decomposed into two sub-problems: (1) speech-driven lip motion generation and (2) visual appearance synthesis. Current solutions handle the two sub-problems within a single generative model, resulting in a challenging trade-off between lip-sync quality and visual details preservation. Instead, we propose to disentangle the motion and appearance, and then generate them one by one with a speech-to-motion diffusion model and a motion-conditioned appearance generation model. However, there still remain challenges in each stage, such as motion-aware identity preservation in (1) and visual details preservation in (2). Therefore, to preserve personal identity, we adopt landmarks to represent the motion, and further employ a landmark-based identity loss. To capture motion-agnostic visual details, we use separate encoders to encode the lip, non-lip appearance and motion, and then integrate them with a learned fusion module. We train MyTalk on a large-scale and diverse dataset. Experiments show that our method generalizes well to the unknown, even out-of-domain person, in terms of both lip sync and visual detail preservation. We encourage the readers to watch the videos on our project page (https://Ingrid789.github.io/MyTalk/).

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024

INFP: Audio-Driven Interactive Head Generation in Dyadic Conversations

Imagine having a conversation with a socially intelligent agent. It can attentively listen to your words and offer visual and linguistic feedback promptly. This seamless interaction allows for multiple rounds of conversation to flow smoothly and naturally. In pursuit of actualizing it, we propose INFP, a novel audio-driven head generation framework for dyadic interaction. Unlike previous head generation works that only focus on single-sided communication, or require manual role assignment and explicit role switching, our model drives the agent portrait dynamically alternates between speaking and listening state, guided by the input dyadic audio. Specifically, INFP comprises a Motion-Based Head Imitation stage and an Audio-Guided Motion Generation stage. The first stage learns to project facial communicative behaviors from real-life conversation videos into a low-dimensional motion latent space, and use the motion latent codes to animate a static image. The second stage learns the mapping from the input dyadic audio to motion latent codes through denoising, leading to the audio-driven head generation in interactive scenarios. To facilitate this line of research, we introduce DyConv, a large scale dataset of rich dyadic conversations collected from the Internet. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate superior performance and effectiveness of our method. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/INFP/.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior

Recent work has demonstrated the significant potential of denoising diffusion models for generating human motion, including text-to-motion capabilities. However, these methods are restricted by the paucity of annotated motion data, a focus on single-person motions, and a lack of detailed control. In this paper, we introduce three forms of composition based on diffusion priors: sequential, parallel, and model composition. Using sequential composition, we tackle the challenge of long sequence generation. We introduce DoubleTake, an inference-time method with which we generate long animations consisting of sequences of prompted intervals and their transitions, using a prior trained only for short clips. Using parallel composition, we show promising steps toward two-person generation. Beginning with two fixed priors as well as a few two-person training examples, we learn a slim communication block, ComMDM, to coordinate interaction between the two resulting motions. Lastly, using model composition, we first train individual priors to complete motions that realize a prescribed motion for a given joint. We then introduce DiffusionBlending, an interpolation mechanism to effectively blend several such models to enable flexible and efficient fine-grained joint and trajectory-level control and editing. We evaluate the composition methods using an off-the-shelf motion diffusion model, and further compare the results to dedicated models trained for these specific tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 2, 2023

MUGEN: A Unified Framework for Efficient Motion Understanding and Generation

Grounding human motion in language, and language in motion, is a central step toward physical AI systems that can understand, generate, and communicate human behavior. Unified motion--language systems first coupled the two directions through a shared discrete motion codebook, but quantization limits generation quality. The strongest generators buy quality back at growing cost: stacked residual codebooks enlarge the representation; masked decoding stages, long autoregressive rollouts, and denoising chains of tens to hundreds of steps stretch inference; even the continuous-latent designs among them reach their latent only through an iterative diffusion head; and none of this decoding machinery serves understanding. We therefore propose MUGEN, a unified motion--language framework that pays neither cost: no codebook, one draw. A single adaptive-length autoencoder compresses any-length motion into a few continuous latent slots, the system's only motion representation: the language model generates them for text-to-motion and reads them back for motion understanding. Depth-routed hidden states let each slot read from the transformer depth it needs, and a calibrated head predicts a joint distribution over the full latent set, so a single draw carries the text-conditional, cross-slot variation a description permits. At a decoding cost of K language-model steps, one draw, and one decoder pass, MUGEN leads language-model baselines on FID on HumanML3D while raising retrieval precision above the real-motion reference under the standard evaluator, achieves the best CIDEr and BLEU@4 scores, and surpasses the discrete-token state of the art on every retrieval and alignment metric on SnapMoGen.

xl-stack-lab XL-Stack Lab
·
Aug 5

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

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.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

SyncTalk++: High-Fidelity and Efficient Synchronized Talking Heads Synthesis Using Gaussian Splatting

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. 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 results. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the ''devil'' in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk++, which features a Dynamic Portrait Renderer with Gaussian Splatting to ensure consistent subject identity preservation and a Face-Sync Controller that aligns lip movements with speech while innovatively using a 3D facial blendshape model to reconstruct accurate facial expressions. To ensure natural head movements, we propose a Head-Sync Stabilizer, which optimizes head poses for greater stability. Additionally, SyncTalk++ enhances robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) audio by incorporating an Expression Generator and a Torso Restorer, which generate speech-matched facial expressions and seamless torso regions. Our approach maintains consistency and continuity in visual details across frames and significantly improves rendering speed and quality, achieving up to 101 frames per second. 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++.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025

ChatAnyone: Stylized Real-time Portrait Video Generation with Hierarchical Motion Diffusion Model

Real-time interactive video-chat portraits have been increasingly recognized as the future trend, particularly due to the remarkable progress made in text and voice chat technologies. However, existing methods primarily focus on real-time generation of head movements, but struggle to produce synchronized body motions that match these head actions. Additionally, achieving fine-grained control over the speaking style and nuances of facial expressions remains a challenge. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework for stylized real-time portrait video generation, enabling expressive and flexible video chat that extends from talking head to upper-body interaction. Our approach consists of the following two stages. The first stage involves efficient hierarchical motion diffusion models, that take both explicit and implicit motion representations into account based on audio inputs, which can generate a diverse range of facial expressions with stylistic control and synchronization between head and body movements. The second stage aims to generate portrait video featuring upper-body movements, including hand gestures. We inject explicit hand control signals into the generator to produce more detailed hand movements, and further perform face refinement to enhance the overall realism and expressiveness of the portrait video. Additionally, our approach supports efficient and continuous generation of upper-body portrait video in maximum 512 * 768 resolution at up to 30fps on 4090 GPU, supporting interactive video-chat in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of our approach to produce portrait videos with rich expressiveness and natural upper-body movements.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025 3

SpeechGym: An Audio-Native Gym for Training Voice Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Voice agents must call tools and hold multi-turn dialogue entirely through speech, yet the dominant paradigm trains them in text. Existing frameworks either cascade TTS and ASR around a proprietary voice API, where gradients cannot flow and per-call cost makes on-policy reinforcement learning prohibitive, or stay in text: they measure voice agents but cannot improve them. We present SpeechGym, an audio-native agentic environment in which two omni-modal models converse in native audio, with no external ASR or TTS and no API boundary, over the unmodified tasks, tools and success check of an established text agentic benchmark, so that the interaction modality is the only variable and the loop stays local and trainable end to end. Audio agentic capability does not follow from audio understanding. The failures speech introduces are perceptual rather than reasoning deficits: the agent picks the right tool and the right argument slot but fills it with a value misheard from the waveform, and that single error cascades into a failed call, a retry of the same call, and a wasted step budget. A second failure is behavioural: under an insistent caller the agent performs an unauthorised write and ends the episode believing it helped. Both are trainable, because the environment labels them for free: a call with a misheard argument fails against the database while a correct one succeeds. The obstacle is sparsity, not signal. Outcome-only GRPO is gradient-starved here, since almost every rollout group fails identically, while a per-turn process reward crediting each successful tool call restores variance to nearly every group. Trained this way, the agent transfers with no further tuning to an independently implemented voice benchmark, more than doubling task success and carrying an open-weights model from last place to second on that leaderboard, while using fewer turns and tokens than before training.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 25

Talking Turns: Benchmarking Audio Foundation Models on Turn-Taking Dynamics

The recent wave of audio foundation models (FMs) could provide new capabilities for conversational modeling. However, there have been limited efforts to evaluate these audio FMs comprehensively on their ability to have natural and interactive conversations. To engage in meaningful conversation with the end user, we would want the FMs to additionally perform a fluent succession of turns without too much overlapping speech or long stretches of silence. Inspired by this, we ask whether the recently proposed audio FMs can understand, predict, and perform turn-taking events? To answer this, we propose a novel evaluation protocol that can assess spoken dialog system's turn-taking capabilities using a supervised model as a judge that has been trained to predict turn-taking events in human-human conversations. Using this protocol, we present the first comprehensive user study that evaluates existing spoken dialogue systems on their ability to perform turn-taking events and reveal many interesting insights, such as they sometimes do not understand when to speak up, can interrupt too aggressively and rarely backchannel. We further evaluate multiple open-source and proprietary audio FMs accessible through APIs on carefully curated test benchmarks from Switchboard to measure their ability to understand and predict turn-taking events and identify significant room for improvement. We will open source our evaluation platform to promote the development of advanced conversational AI systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 2, 2025

EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesis

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/

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2024

DartControl: A Diffusion-Based Autoregressive Motion Model for Real-Time Text-Driven Motion Control

Text-conditioned human motion generation, which allows for user interaction through natural language, has become increasingly popular. Existing methods typically generate short, isolated motions based on a single input sentence. However, human motions are continuous and can extend over long periods, carrying rich semantics. Creating long, complex motions that precisely respond to streams of text descriptions, particularly in an online and real-time setting, remains a significant challenge. Furthermore, incorporating spatial constraints into text-conditioned motion generation presents additional challenges, as it requires aligning the motion semantics specified by text descriptions with geometric information, such as goal locations and 3D scene geometry. To address these limitations, we propose DartControl, in short DART, a Diffusion-based Autoregressive motion primitive model for Real-time Text-driven motion control. Our model effectively learns a compact motion primitive space jointly conditioned on motion history and text inputs using latent diffusion models. By autoregressively generating motion primitives based on the preceding history and current text input, DART enables real-time, sequential motion generation driven by natural language descriptions. Additionally, the learned motion primitive space allows for precise spatial motion control, which we formulate either as a latent noise optimization problem or as a Markov decision process addressed through reinforcement learning. We present effective algorithms for both approaches, demonstrating our model's versatility and superior performance in various motion synthesis tasks. Experiments show our method outperforms existing baselines in motion realism, efficiency, and controllability. Video results are available on the project page: https://zkf1997.github.io/DART/.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

FantasyTalking: Realistic Talking Portrait Generation via Coherent Motion Synthesis

Creating a realistic animatable avatar from a single static portrait remains challenging. Existing approaches often struggle to capture subtle facial expressions, the associated global body movements, and the dynamic background. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that leverages a pretrained video diffusion transformer model to generate high-fidelity, coherent talking portraits with controllable motion dynamics. At the core of our work is a dual-stage audio-visual alignment strategy. In the first stage, we employ a clip-level training scheme to establish coherent global motion by aligning audio-driven dynamics across the entire scene, including the reference portrait, contextual objects, and background. In the second stage, we refine lip movements at the frame level using a lip-tracing mask, ensuring precise synchronization with audio signals. To preserve identity without compromising motion flexibility, we replace the commonly used reference network with a facial-focused cross-attention module that effectively maintains facial consistency throughout the video. Furthermore, we integrate a motion intensity modulation module that explicitly controls expression and body motion intensity, enabling controllable manipulation of portrait movements beyond mere lip motion. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves higher quality with better realism, coherence, motion intensity, and identity preservation. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-talking/.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 7, 2025 4

SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Models

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models support low-latency turn taking, interruption handling, and backchanneling, yet a key capability remains underexplored: steerability, the ability to reliably shift conversational behavior along attributes such as tone, persona, speaking rate, and voice style in response to user instructions. We introduce a taxonomy of text- and audio-based steerability that identifies substantial gaps in current full-duplex models. To address this gap, we introduce SteerDuplex, a Moshi-based full-duplex speech model fine-tuned on natural conversations and synthetic dialogues targeting instruction following, vocal delivery, reasoning, and duplex interaction. We further apply two-stage reinforcement learning (RL) with hybrid rewards, combining verifiable interaction checks and judge-based semantic feedback to improve timing and response continuity. To evaluate full-duplex spoken steerability, we introduce SteerBench, a benchmark with 390 spoken prompts and 1,067 human-authored binary audio and text rubrics spanning tone, persona, style/accent, and speed/length. On SteerBench, supervised training improves audio-steering average pass rate by 44.5 percentage points over the strongest evaluated open baseline. On Audio MultiChallenge, task average pass rate improves by 7 points over its strongest evaluated open baseline. RL further raises source-clean interruption response from 72.5% to 82.5% and reduces synthetic pause barge-in from 26.5% to 9%. Steering and aggregate task scores remain comparable or higher, while reward probes reveal reward hacking through incomplete responses. Our model and benchmark support systematic research on spoken steerability, with reward analysis showing why timing gains must be evaluated alongside response completeness.

ScaleAI Scale AI
·
Sep 10 2

DiffuPlex: Accelerating Full-Duplex Spoken Dialog Models via Rolling Masked Diffusion

Recent full-duplex spoken dialog models enable simultaneous listening and speaking, but fine-grained models still advance their backbone autoregressively at every interaction frame. We introduce DiffuPlex, a rolling masked diffusion framework that reduces this sequential computation by predicting multiple future user and assistant frames in a single backbone wake. DiffuPlex consumes only a confident prefix of each predicted future while interaction continues at the original frame rate. As user speech arrives, it checks the corresponding user predictions and, when the interaction diverges, preserves already played assistant content while revising only the unplayed future. We consider two inference policies over the same predictor: DiffuPlex-LISTEN consumes multiple future frames when they predict assistant silence, whereas DiffuPlex-SPEAK can also consume predicted assistant speech. Across full-duplex interaction and spoken-language evaluations, DiffuPlex substantially reduces sequential backbone computation while largely preserving interaction behavior and general capability. DiffuPlex-LISTEN and DiffuPlex-SPEAK achieve 1.46times and 1.59times deployment-path wall-clock speedups and 1.61times and 1.80times Core LM speedups, with all measured backbone invocations completing within the 80ms interaction interval. Human evaluation shows that LISTEN preserves speech naturalness and conversational quality, while SPEAK retains conversational quality with some degradation in speech naturalness.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 8

DiTalker: A Unified DiT-based Framework for High-Quality and Speaking Styles Controllable Portrait Animation

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/

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025

Why Full-Duplex Speech Models Collapse in Long Conversations

Full-duplex speech models listen and speak at the same time, which makes them promising for natural, open-ended conversation. But can they sustain a coherent conversation for tens of minutes? Because they generate a token every frame, even while listening, they exhaust their context windows within minutes. Yet existing benchmarks evaluate only single turns or a few conversational rounds, too short to expose the long-horizon problem. We introduce the Full-Duplex Long-Horizon Benchmark (FD-LHB), which tests five recent full-duplex models on long replayed conversations and in live conversation with an LLM partner. Every evaluated model eventually either degrades or exhausts its context. Models that keep the full history often degrade before their context runs out, while sliding-window models still fall into repetition, silence, and gibberish. For sliding-window models, we identify two contributing mechanisms. Gibberish and silence are linked to Initialization-Anchor Eviction, where the sliding window discards the first KV entry. Repetition is also reinforced by the model's own recent outputs. Guided by this diagnosis, we apply two simple fixes: Initialization-Anchor Pinning (IAP) keeps that first entry, and Duplex Repetition Penalty (DRP) discourages echoing while guarding against prolonged silence. Together, they support the diagnosis and, without retraining, substantially reduce conversational collapse in replays of up to an hour while running in real time.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 22

FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations

Full-duplex voice interaction allows users and agents to speak simultaneously with controllable barge-in, enabling lifelike assistants and customer service. Existing solutions are either end-to-end, difficult to design and hard to control, or modular pipelines governed by turn-taking controllers that ease upgrades and per-module optimization; however, prior modular frameworks depend on non-open components and external providers, limiting holistic optimization. In this work, we present a complete, practical full-duplex voice interaction system comprising a turn-taking controller, an interaction module, and a dialogue manager. The controller integrates streaming personalized VAD (pVAD) to suppress false barge-ins from noise and non-primary speakers, precisely timestamp primary-speaker segments, and explicitly enable primary-speaker barge-ins; a semantic end-of-turn detector improves stop decisions. It upgrades heterogeneous half-duplex pipelines, cascaded, semi-cascaded, and speech-to-speech, to full duplex. Using internal models, we implement cascaded and semi-cascaded variants; the semi-cascaded one captures emotional and paralinguistic cues, yields more coherent responses, lowers latency and error propagation, and improves robustness. A dialogue manager extends capabilities via tool invocation and context management. We also propose three system-level metrics, barge-in, end-of-turn detection accuracy, and end-to-end latency, to assess naturalness, control accuracy, and efficiency. Experiments show fewer false interruptions, more accurate semantic ends, and lower latency approaching industrial systems, enabling robust, natural, real-time full-duplex interaction. Demos: https://fireredteam.github.io/demos/firered_chat.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025

MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model

Recent advances in text-to-motion generation using diffusion and autoregressive models have shown promising results. However, these models often suffer from a trade-off between real-time performance, high fidelity, and motion editability. To address this gap, we introduce MMM, a novel yet simple motion generation paradigm based on Masked Motion Model. MMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into a sequence of discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a conditional masked motion transformer that learns to predict randomly masked motion tokens, conditioned on the pre-computed text tokens. By attending to motion and text tokens in all directions, MMM explicitly captures inherent dependency among motion tokens and semantic mapping between motion and text tokens. During inference, this allows parallel and iterative decoding of multiple motion tokens that are highly consistent with fine-grained text descriptions, therefore simultaneously achieving high-fidelity and high-speed motion generation. In addition, MMM has innate motion editability. By simply placing mask tokens in the place that needs editing, MMM automatically fills the gaps while guaranteeing smooth transitions between editing and non-editing parts. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that MMM surpasses current leading methods in generating high-quality motion (evidenced by superior FID scores of 0.08 and 0.429), while offering advanced editing features such as body-part modification, motion in-betweening, and the synthesis of long motion sequences. In addition, MMM is two orders of magnitude faster on a single mid-range GPU than editable motion diffusion models. Our project page is available at https://exitudio.github.io/MMM-page.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

KMTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Key Motion Embedding

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D facial motions from audio sequences using key motion embeddings. Despite recent advancements in data-driven techniques, accurately mapping between audio signals and 3D facial meshes remains challenging. Direct regression of the entire sequence often leads to over-smoothed results due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. To this end, we propose a progressive learning mechanism that generates 3D facial animations by introducing key motion capture to decrease cross-modal mapping uncertainty and learning complexity. Concretely, our method integrates linguistic and data-driven priors through two modules: the linguistic-based key motion acquisition and the cross-modal motion completion. The former identifies key motions and learns the associated 3D facial expressions, ensuring accurate lip-speech synchronization. The latter extends key motions into a full sequence of 3D talking faces guided by audio features, improving temporal coherence and audio-visual consistency. Extensive experimental comparisons against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach in generating more vivid and consistent talking face animations. Consistent enhancements in results through the integration of our proposed learning scheme with existing methods underscore the efficacy of our approach. Our code and weights will be at the project website: https://github.com/ffxzh/KMTalk.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024