# READ Avatars: Realistic Emotion-controllable Audio Driven Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00744/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [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)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [Simple and Effective Zero-shot Cross-lingual Phoneme Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11680/) (2021)
- [LipSync3D: Data-Efficient Learning of Personalized 3D Talking Faces from Video using Pose and Lighting Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04185/) (2021)
- [Neural Style-Preserving Visual Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02518/) (2019)
- [Masked Lip-Sync Prediction by Audio-Visual Contextual Exploitation in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04970/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Speech-Driven Facial Animation with Temporal GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09313/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [KeyFace: Expressive Audio-Driven Facial Animation for Long Sequences via KeyFrame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01715/) (2025)
- [EmoFace: Audio-driven Emotional 3D Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12501/) (2024)
- [GASP: Gaussian Avatars with Synthetic Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07739/) (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)
- [TalkLoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation for Speech-Driven Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13714/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present READ Avatars, a 3D-based approach for generating 2D avatars that are driven by audio input with direct and granular control over the emotion. Previous methods are unable to achieve realistic animation due to the many-to-many nature of audio to expression mappings. We alleviate this issue by introducing an adversarial loss in the audio-to-expression generation process. This removes the smoothing effect of regression-based models and helps to improve the realism and expressiveness of the generated avatars. We note furthermore, that audio should be directly utilized when generating mouth interiors and that other 3D-based methods do not attempt this. We address this with audio-conditioned neural textures, which are resolution-independent. To evaluate the performance of our method, we perform quantitative and qualitative experiments, including a user study. We also propose a new metric for comparing how well an actor's emotion is reconstructed in the generated avatar. Our results show that our approach outperforms state of the art audio-driven avatar generation methods across several metrics. A demo video can be found at urlhttps://youtu.be/QSyMl3vV0pA