# That's What I Said: Fully-Controllable Talking Face Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03275/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in the GAN Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03754/) (2020)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (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)
- [On the "steerability" of generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07171/) (2019)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [HyperStyle: StyleGAN Inversion with HyperNetworks for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15666/) (2021)
- [GANalyze: Toward Visual Definitions of Cognitive Image Properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10112/) (2019)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09043/) (2022)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [Audio2Head: Audio-driven One-shot Talking-head Generation with Natural Head Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09293/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Faces that Speak: Jointly Synthesising Talking Face and Speech from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10272/) (2024)
- [Breathing Life into Faces: Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation with Natural Head Pose and Detailed Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20240/) (2023)
- [JEAN: Joint Expression and Audio-guided NeRF-based Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12156/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Convolutional SyncNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00971/) (2024)
- [Test-Time Augmentation for Pose-invariant Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09256/) (2025)
- [TAVID: Text-Driven Audio-Visual Interactive Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20296/) (2025)
- [G4G:A Generic Framework for High Fidelity Talking Face Generation with Fine-grained Intra-modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18122/) (2024)
- [AlignFace: Human-Aligned Face Similarity Metric with Interpretable Concept Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14130/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this paper is to synthesise talking faces with controllable facial motions. To achieve this goal, we propose two key ideas. The first is to establish a canonical space where every face has the same motion patterns but different identities. The second is to navigate a multimodal motion space that only represents motion-related features while eliminating identity information. To disentangle identity and motion, we introduce an orthogonality constraint between the two different latent spaces. From this, our method can generate natural-looking talking faces with fully controllable facial attributes and accurate lip synchronisation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of both visual quality and lip-sync score. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop a talking face generation framework that can accurately manifest full target facial motions including lip, head pose, and eye movements in the generated video without any additional supervision beyond RGB video with audio.