# FaceXHuBERT: Text-less Speech-driven E(X)pressive 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05416 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05416/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2023.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [FaceScape: a Large-scale High Quality 3D Face Dataset and Detailed Riggable 3D Face Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13989/) (2020)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02379/) (2023)
- [Learning to Regress 3D Face Shape and Expression from an Image without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06817/) (2019)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [Diffused Heads: Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Talking-Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03396/) (2023)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [Pixel Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04638/) (2021)
- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [Multiface: A Dataset for Neural Face Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11243/) (2022)
- [VisemeNet: Audio-Driven Animator-Centric Speech Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09488/) (2018)
- [Facial Action Unit Detection Using Attention and Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03457/) (2018)
- [Let's Face It: Probabilistic Multi-modal Interlocutor-aware Generation of Facial Gestures in Dyadic Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09888/) (2020)
- [Live Speech Portraits: Real-Time Photorealistic Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10595/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00434/) (2023)
- [FaceDiffuser: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11306/) (2023)
- [Media2Face: Co-speech Facial Animation Generation With Multi-Modality Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15687/) (2024)
- [ScanTalk: 3D Talking Heads from Unregistered Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10942/) (2024)
- [EmoTalk3D: High-Fidelity Free-View Synthesis of Emotional 3D Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00297/) (2024)
- [ProbTalk3D: Non-Deterministic Emotion Controllable Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using VQ-VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07966/) (2024)
- [Cafe-Talk: Generating 3D Talking Face Animation with Multimodal Coarse- and Fine-grained Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14517/) (2025)
- [Wav2Sem: Plug-and-Play Audio Semantic Decoupling for 3D Speech-Driven Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23290/) (2025)
- [Audio2Face-3D: Audio-driven Realistic Facial Animation For Digital Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16401/) (2025)
- [PMMTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation from Complementary Pseudo Multi-modal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02781/) (2023)
- [Advancing Talking Head Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Multi-Modal Methodologies, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Loss Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02900/) (2025)
- [Beyond Fixed Topologies: Unregistered Training and Comprehensive Evaluation Metrics for 3D Talking Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11041/) (2024)
- [SyncAnimation: A Real-Time End-to-End Framework for Audio-Driven Human Pose and Talking Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14646/) (2025)
- [Towards High-fidelity 3D Talking Avatar with Personalized Dynamic Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00495/) (2025)
- [Supervising 3D Talking Head Avatars with Analysis-by-Audio-Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13386/) (2025)
- [Audio Driven Real-Time Facial Animation for Social Telepresence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01176/) (2025)
- [DiffusionTalker: Efficient and Compact Speech-Driven 3D Talking Head via Personalizer-Guided Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18159/) (2025)
- [LSF-Animation: Label-Free Speech-Driven Facial Animation via Implicit Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21864/) (2025)
- [Tiny is not small enough: High-quality, low-resource facial animation models through hybrid knowledge distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18352/) (2025)
- [3DFacePolicy: Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation Based on Action Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10848/) (2024)
- [MoDiT: Learning Highly Consistent 3D Motion Coefficients with Diffusion Transformer for Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05092/) (2025)
- [MANGO:Natural Multi-speaker 3D Talking Head Generation via 2D-Lifted Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01749/) (2026)
- [Mitigation of gender bias in automatic facial non-verbal behaviors generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07274/) (2024)
- [Giving Faces Their Feelings Back: Explicit Emotion Control for Feedforward Single-Image 3D Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14541/) (2026)
- [Polyglot: Multilingual Style Preserving Speech-Driven Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16108/) (2026)
- [Personalizing Causal Audio-Driven Facial Motion via Dynamic Multi-modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23692/) (2026)
- [Back to the museum: Investigation of the acceptance of Android Andrea with and without emotion simulation in a museum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16428/) (2026)
- [A Case Study on the Acceptance of a Humanoid Robotic Head Employed in Three Public Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24113/) (2026)
- [Seeing Speech: Learning Visible Articulatory Dynamics for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30517/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents FaceXHuBERT, a text-less speech-driven 3D facial animation generation method that allows to capture personalized and subtle cues in speech (e.g. identity, emotion and hesitation). It is also very robust to background noise and can handle audio recorded in a variety of situations (e.g. multiple people speaking). Recent approaches employ end-to-end deep learning taking into account both audio and text as input to generate facial animation for the whole face. However, scarcity of publicly available expressive audio-3D facial animation datasets poses a major bottleneck. The resulting animations still have issues regarding accurate lip-synching, expressivity, person-specific information and generalizability. We effectively employ self-supervised pretrained HuBERT model in the training process that allows us to incorporate both lexical and non-lexical information in the audio without using a large lexicon. Additionally, guiding the training with a binary emotion condition and speaker identity distinguishes the tiniest subtle facial motion. We carried out extensive objective and subjective evaluation in comparison to ground-truth and state-of-the-art work. A perceptual user study demonstrates that our approach produces superior results with respect to the realism of the animation 78% of the time in comparison to the state-of-the-art. In addition, our method is 4 times faster eliminating the use of complex sequential models such as transformers. We strongly recommend watching the supplementary video before reading the paper. We also provide the implementation and evaluation codes with a GitHub repository link.