# Masked Lip-Sync Prediction by Audio-Visual Contextual Exploitation in Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04970/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [StyleSwin: Transformer-based GAN for High-resolution Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10762/) (2021)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [Audio2Head: Audio-driven One-shot Talking-head Generation with Natural Head Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09293/) (2021)
- [Realistic Speech-Driven Facial Animation with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06337/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15931/) (2024)
- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [SyncTalk: The Devil is in the Synchronization for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17590/) (2023)
- [SelfTalk: A Self-Supervised Commutative Training Diagram to Comprehend 3D Talking Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10799/) (2023)
- [Diff2Lip: Audio Conditioned Diffusion Models for Lip-Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09716/) (2023)
- [MuseTalk: Real-Time High-Fidelity Video Dubbing via Spatio-Temporal Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10122/) (2024)
- [TALK-Act: Enhance Textural-Awareness for 2D Speaking Avatar Reenactment with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10696/) (2024)
- [DreamTalk: When Emotional Talking Head Generation Meets Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09767/) (2023)
- [EmoTalk3D: High-Fidelity Free-View Synthesis of Emotional 3D Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00297/) (2024)
- [ReSyncer: Rewiring Style-based Generator for Unified Audio-Visually Synced Facial Performer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03284/) (2024)
- [RealTalk: Real-time and Realistic Audio-driven Face Generation with 3D Facial Prior-guided Identity Alignment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18284/) (2024)
- [Audio-driven Talking Face Generation with Stabilized Synchronization Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09368/) (2023)
- [AVI-Talking: Learning Audio-Visual Instructions for Expressive 3D Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16124/) (2024)
- [MyStyle++: A Controllable Personalized Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04865/) (2023)
- [GLDiTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Graph Latent Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01826/) (2024)
- [Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation from In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11541/) (2023)
- [READ Avatars: Realistic Emotion-controllable Audio Driven Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00744/) (2023)
- [EMOdiffhead: Continuously Emotional Control in Talking Head Generation via Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07255/) (2024)
- [Task-adaptive Q-Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09059/) (2024)
- [Stereo-Talker: Audio-driven 3D Human Synthesis with Prior-Guided Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23836/) (2024)
- [Dubbing for Everyone: Data-Efficient Visual Dubbing using Neural Rendering Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06126/) (2024)
- [JambaTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Talking Head Generation Based on Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01627/) (2024)
- [DreamHead: Learning Spatial-Temporal Correspondence via Hierarchical Diffusion for Audio-driven Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10281/) (2024)
- [FREAK: Frequency-modulated High-fidelity and Real-time Audio-driven Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04067/) (2025)
- [Learning Phonetic Context-Dependent Viseme for Enhancing Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20568/) (2025)
- [GMTalker: Gaussian Mixture-based Audio-Driven Emotional Talking Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07669/) (2023)
- [GenSync: A Generalized Talking Head Framework for Audio-driven Multi-Subject Lip-Sync using 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01928/) (2025)
- [MoDiT: Learning Highly Consistent 3D Motion Coefficients with Diffusion Transformer for Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05092/) (2025)
- [Mask-Free Audio-driven Talking Face Generation for Enhanced Visual Quality and Identity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20953/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Visual Deepfake Detection: Can AI Predict and Prevent Fake Content Before It's Created?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18461/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Previous studies have explored generating accurately lip-synced talking faces for arbitrary targets given audio conditions. However, most of them deform or generate the whole facial area, leading to non-realistic results. In this work, we delve into the formulation of altering only the mouth shapes of the target person. This requires masking a large percentage of the original image and seamlessly inpainting it with the aid of audio and reference frames. To this end, we propose the Audio-Visual Context-Aware Transformer (AV-CAT) framework, which produces accurate lip-sync with photo-realistic quality by predicting the masked mouth shapes. Our key insight is to exploit desired contextual information provided in audio and visual modalities thoroughly with delicately designed Transformers. Specifically, we propose a convolution-Transformer hybrid backbone and design an attention-based fusion strategy for filling the masked parts. It uniformly attends to the textural information on the unmasked regions and the reference frame. Then the semantic audio information is involved in enhancing the self-attention computation. Additionally, a refinement network with audio injection improves both image and lip-sync quality. Extensive experiments validate that our model can generate high-fidelity lip-synced results for arbitrary subjects.