Most current audio-driven facial animation research primarily focuses on generating videos with neutral emotions. While some studies have addressed the generation of facial videos driven by emotional audio, efficiently generating high-quality talking head videos that integrate both emotional expressions and style features remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose ESGaussianFace, an innovative framework for emotional and stylized audio-driven facial animation. Our approach leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct 3D scenes and render videos, ensuring efficient generation of 3D consistent results. We propose an emotion-audio-guided spatial attention method that effectively integrates emotion features with audio content features. Through emotion-guided attention, the model is able to reconstruct facial details across different emotional states more accurately. To achieve emotional and stylized deformations of the 3D Gaussian points through emotion and style features, we introduce two 3D Gaussian deformation predictors. Futhermore, we propose a multi-stage training strategy, enabling the step-by-step learning of the character's lip movements, emotional variations, and style features. Our generated results exhibit high efficiency, high quality, and 3D consistency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of lip movement accuracy, expression variation, and style feature expressiveness.

Numerous researches on real-time motion generation primarily focus on kinematic aspects, often resulting in physically implausible outcomes. In this paper, we present POMP ("Physics-cOnstrainable Motion Generative Model through Phase Manifolds"), a kinematics-based framework that synthesizes physically realistic motions by leveraging phase manifolds to align motion priors with physics constraints. POMP operates as a frame-by-frame autoregressive model with three core components: a diffusion-based kinematic module, a simulation-based dynamic module, and a phase encoding module. At each timestep, the kinematic module first generates an initial pose, which is subsequently revised by the dynamic module through a simulation step to incorporate physical constraints. While individual simulation steps induce negligible kinematic distortion, accumulated discrepancies can drive the result beyond the motion prior learned by the kinematic module, leading to failure in subsequent motion generation. To address this, the phase encoding module applies semantic alignment in the phase manifold, projecting the simulated result back to the motion prior. Moreover, we present a pipeline in Unity for generating terrain maps and capturing full-body motion impulses from existing motion capture dataset. The collected terrain topology and motion impulse data facilitate the training of POMP, enabling it to robustly respond to underlying contact forces and applied dynamics. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of POMP across various tasks.

Talking head generation is gaining significant importance across various domains, with a growing demand for high-quality rendering. However, existing methods often suffer from identity leakage (IL) and rendering artifacts (RA), particularly in extreme cases. Through an in-depth analysis of previous approaches, we identify two key insights: (1) IL arises from identity information embedded within motion features, and (2) this identity information can be leveraged to address RA. Building on these findings, this paper introduces FixTalk, a novel framework designed to simultaneously resolve both issues for high-quality talking head generation. Firstly, we propose an Enhanced Motion Indicator (EMI) to effectively decouple identity information from motion features, mitigating the impact of IL on generated talking heads. To address RA, we introduce an Enhanced Detail Indicator (EDI), which utilizes the leaked identity information to supplement missing details, thus fixing the artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FixTalk effectively mitigates IL and RA, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Real-time motion generation has garnered significant attention within the fields of computer animation and gaming. Existing methods typically realize motion control via isolated style or content labels, resulting in short, simply motion clips. In this paper, we propose a motion generation framework, called SPORT ("from zero-Shot Prompt tO Real-Time motion generation"), for generating real-time and ever-changing motions using zero-shot prompts. SPORT consists of three primary components: (1) a body-part phase autoencoder that ensures smooth transitions between diverse motions; (2) a body-part content encoder that mitigates semantic gap between texts and motions; (3) a diffusion-based decoder that accelerates the denoising process while enhancing the diversity and realism of motions. Moreover, we develop a prototype for real-time application in Unity, demonstrating that our approach effectively considering the semantic gap caused by abstract style texts and rapidly changing terrains. Through qualitative and quantitative comparisons, we show that SPORT outperforms other approaches in terms of motion quality, style diversity and inference speed.

Audio-driven 3D facial animation is crucial for enhancing the metaverse's realism, immersion, and interactivity. While most existing methods focus on generating highly realistic and lively 2D talking head videos by leveraging extensive 2D video datasets these approaches work in pixel space and are not easily adaptable to 3D environments. We present VASA-Rig, which has achieved a significant advancement in the realism of lip-audio synchronization, facial dynamics, and head movements. In particular, we introduce a novel rig parameter-based emotional talking face dataset and propose the Latents2Rig model, which facilitates the transformation of 2D facial animations into 3D. Unlike mesh-based models, VASA-Rig outputs rig parameters, instantiated in this paper as 174 Metahuman rig parameters, making it more suitable for integration into industry-standard pipelines. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both realism and accuracy.

Generating stylized talking head with diverse head motions is crucial for achieving natural-looking videos but still remains challenging. Previous works either adopt a regressive method to capture the speaking style, resulting in a coarse style that is averaged across all training data, or employ a universal network to synthesize videos with different styles which causes suboptimal performance. To address these, we propose a novel dynamic-weight method, namely Say Anything with Any Style (SAAS), which queries the discrete style representation via a generative model with a learned style codebook. Specifically, we develop a multi-task VQ-VAE that incorporates three closely related tasks to learn a style codebook as a prior for style extraction. This discrete prior, along with the generative model, enhances the precision and robustness when extracting the speaking styles of the given style clips. By utilizing the extracted style, a residual architecture comprising a canonical branch and style-specific branch is employed to predict the mouth shapes conditioned on any driving audio while transferring the speaking style from the source to any desired one. To adapt to different speaking styles, we steer clear of employing a universal network by exploring an elaborate HyperStyle to produce the style-specific weights offset for the style branch. Furthermore, we construct a pose generator and a pose codebook to store the quantized pose representation, allowing us to sample diverse head motions aligned with the audio and the extracted style. Experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of both lip-synchronization and stylized expression. Besides, we extend our SAAS to video-driven style editing field and achieve satisfactory performance as well.

Although automatically animating audio-driven talking heads has recently received growing interest, previous efforts have mainly concentrated on achieving lip synchronization with the audio, neglecting two crucial elements for generating expressive videos: emotion style and art style. In this paper, we present an innovative audio-driven talking face generation method called Style2Talker. It involves two stylized stages, namely Style-E and Style-A, which integrate text-controlled emotion style and picture-controlled art style into the final output. In order to prepare the scarce emotional text descriptions corresponding to the videos, we propose a labor-free paradigm that employs large-scale pretrained models to automatically annotate emotional text labels for existing audio-visual datasets. Incorporating the synthetic emotion texts, the Style-E stage utilizes a large-scale CLIP model to extract emotion representations, which are combined with the audio, serving as the condition for an efficient latent diffusion model designed to produce emotional motion coefficients of a 3DMM model. Moving on to the Style-A stage, we develop a coefficient-driven motion generator and an art-specific style path embedded in the well-known StyleGAN. This allows us to synthesize high-resolution artistically stylized talking head videos using the generated emotional motion coefficients and an art style source picture. Moreover, to better preserve image details and avoid artifacts, we provide StyleGAN with the multi-scale content features extracted from the identity image and refine its intermediate feature maps by the designed content encoder and refinement network, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of audio-lip synchronization and performance of both emotion style and art style.

Generating emotional talking faces is a practical yet challenging endeavor. To create a lifelike avatar, we draw upon two critical insights from a human perspective: 1) The connection between audio and the non-deterministic facial dynamics, encompassing expressions, blinks, poses, should exhibit synchronous and one-to-many mapping. 2) Vibrant expressions are often accompanied by emotion-aware high-definition (HD) textures and finely detailed teeth. However, both aspects are frequently overlooked by existing methods. To this end, this paper proposes using normalizing Flow and Vector-Quantization modeling to produce emotional talking faces that satisfy both insights concurrently (FlowVQTalker). Specifically, we develop a flow-based coefficient generator that encodes the dynamics of facial emotion into a multi-emotion-class latent space represented as a mixture distribution. The generation process commences with random sampling from the modeled distribution, guided by the accompanying audio, enabling both lip-synchronization and the uncertain nonverbal facial cues generation. Furthermore, our designed vector-quantization image generator treats the creation of expressive facial images as a code query task, utilizing a learned codebook to provide rich, high-quality textures that enhance the emotional perception of the results. Extensive experiments are conducted to showcase the effectiveness of our approach.

Stylized avatars are common virtual representations used in VR to support interaction and communication between remote collaborators. However, explicit expressions are notoriously difficult to create, mainly because most current methods rely on geometric markers and features modeled for human faces, not stylized avatar faces. To cope with the challenge of emotional and expressive generating talking avatars, we build the Emotional Talking Avatar Dataset which is a talking-face video corpus featuring 6 different stylized characters talking with 7 different emotions. Together with the dataset, we also release an emotional talking avatar generation method which enables the manipulation of emotion. We validated the effectiveness of our dataset and our method in generating audio based puppetry examples, including comparisons to state-of-the-art techniques and a user study. Finally, various applications of this method are discussed in the context of animating avatars in VR.

Synthesizing expression is essential to create realistic talking faces. Previous works consider expressions and mouth shapes as a whole and predict them solely from audio inputs. However, the limited information contained in audio, such as phonemes and coarse emotion embedding, may not be suitable as the source of elaborate expressions. Besides, since expressions are tightly coupled to lip motions, generating expression from other sources is tricky and always neglects expression performed on mouth region, leading to inconsistency between them. To tackle the issues, this paper proposes Emotional Motion Memory Net (EMMN) that synthesizes expression overall on the talking face via emotion embedding and lip motion instead of the sole audio. Specifically, we extract emotion embedding from audio and design Motion Reconstruction module to decompose ground truth videos into mouth features and expression features before training, where the latter encode all facial factors about expression. During training, the emotion embedding and mouth features are used as keys, and the corresponding expression features are used as values to create key-value pairs stored in the proposed Motion Memory Net. Hence, once the audio-relevant mouth features and emotion embedding are individually predicted from audio at inference time, we treat them as a query to retrieve the best-matching expression features, performing expression overall on the face and thus avoiding inconsistent results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality talking face videos with accurate lip movements and vivid expressions on unseen subjects.

The paper presents emotional voice puppetry, an audio-based facial animation approach to portray characters with vivid emotional changes. The lips motion and the surrounding facial areas are controlled by the contents of the audio, and the facial dynamics are established by category of the emotion and the intensity. Our approach is exclusive because it takes account of perceptual validity and geometry instead of pure geometric processes. Another highlight of our approach is the generalizability to multiple characters. The findings showed that training new secondary characters when the rig parameters are categorized as eye, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and signature wrinkles is significant in achieving better generalization results compared to joint training. User studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our approach can be applicable in AR/VR and 3DUI, namely, virtual reality avatars/self-avatars, teleconferencing and in-game dialogue.