# Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation from In-the-Wild Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11541 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11541/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2023.

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

- [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)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (2018)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07786/) (2022)
- [You said that?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02966/) (2017)
- [Talking Face Generation by Conditional Recurrent Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04786/) (2018)
- [Everybody's Talkin': Let Me Talk as You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05201/) (2020)
- [Write-a-speaker: Text-based Emotional and Rhythmic Talking-head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07995/) (2021)
- [Masked Lip-Sync Prediction by Audio-Visual Contextual Exploitation in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04970/) (2022)
- [Modality Dropout for Improved Performance-driven Talking Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13616/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [EmoVOCA: Speech-Driven Emotional 3D Talking Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12886/) (2024)
- [UniLS: End-to-End Audio-Driven Avatars for Unified Listening and Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09327/) (2025)
- [KeyVID: Keyframe-Aware Video Diffusion for Audio-Synchronized Visual Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09656/) (2025)
- [Speaking Beyond Language: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset for Learning Nonverbal Cues from Video-Grounded Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00958/) (2025)
- [Talking Together: Synthesizing Co-Located 3D Conversations from Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08674/) (2026)
- [FreeTalk: Emotional Topology-Free 3D Talking Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15512/) (2026)
- [CapTalk: Text-Guided Stylization and Speech-Driven 3D Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29316/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given an arbitrary audio clip, audio-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate lifelike lip motions and facial expressions for a 3D head. Existing methods typically rely on training their models using limited public 3D datasets that contain a restricted number of audio-3D scan pairs. Consequently, their generalization capability remains limited. In this paper, we propose a novel method that leverages in-the-wild 2D talking-head videos to train our 3D facial animation model. The abundance of easily accessible 2D talking-head videos equips our model with a robust generalization capability. By combining these videos with existing 3D face reconstruction methods, our model excels in generating consistent and high-fidelity lip synchronization. Additionally, our model proficiently captures the speaking styles of different individuals, allowing it to generate 3D talking-heads with distinct personal styles. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method.