# Talking Head Generation with Probabilistic Audio-to-Visual Diffusion Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 66 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [HumanMAC: Masked Motion Completion for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03665/) (2023)
- [EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01647/) (2024)
- [Efficient Region-Aware Neural Radiance Fields for High-Fidelity Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09323/) (2023)
- [Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17881/) (2024)
- [UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06155/) (2025)
- [VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08764/) (2024)
- [GAIA: Zero-shot Talking Avatar Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15230/) (2023)
- [TalkCLIP: Talking Head Generation with Text-Guided Expressive Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00334/) (2023)
- [SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09862/) (2025)
- [Memories are One-to-Many Mapping Alleviators in Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05005/) (2022)
- [CustomListener: Text-guided Responsive Interaction for User-friendly Listening Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00274/) (2024)
- [TALK-Act: Enhance Textural-Awareness for 2D Speaking Avatar Reenactment with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10696/) (2024)
- [InsTaG: Learning Personalized 3D Talking Head from Few-Second Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20387/) (2025)
- [DreamTalk: When Emotional Talking Head Generation Meets Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09767/) (2023)
- [ReSyncer: Rewiring Style-based Generator for Unified Audio-Visually Synced Facial Performer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03284/) (2024)
- [MVPortrait: Text-Guided Motion and Emotion Control for Multi-view Vivid Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19383/) (2025)
- [AgentAvatar: Disentangling Planning, Driving and Rendering for Photorealistic Avatar Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17465/) (2023)
- [AVI-Talking: Learning Audio-Visual Instructions for Expressive 3D Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16124/) (2024)
- [Llama Learns to Direct: DirectorLLM for Human-Centric Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14484/) (2024)
- [Advancing Talking Head Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Multi-Modal Methodologies, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Loss Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02900/) (2025)
- [ConsistEdit: Highly Consistent and Precise Training-free Visual Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17803/) (2025)
- [OSM-Net: One-to-Many One-shot Talking Head Generation with Spontaneous Head Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16148/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Analysis of Talking Head Synthesis: Techniques for Portrait Generation, Driving Mechanisms, and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10553/) (2024)
- [Training-Free Text-Guided Color Editing with Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09131/) (2025)
- [EDTalk++: Full Disentanglement for Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13442/) (2025)
- [UIKA: Fast Universal Head Avatar from Pose-Free Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07603/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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