# GAIA: Zero-shot Talking Avatar Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [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)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08379/) (2021)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15102/) (2021)
- [Real Time Speech Enhancement in the Waveform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12847/) (2020)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [Audio2Head: Audio-driven One-shot Talking-head Generation with Natural Head Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09293/) (2021)
- [Diffused Heads: Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Talking-Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03396/) (2023)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07621/) (2022)
- [Neural Head Reenactment with Latent Pose Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12000/) (2020)
- [HeadGAN: One-shot Neural Head Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08261/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08801/) (2024)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01061/) (2025)
- [Loopy: Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02634/) (2024)
- [OpenHumanVid: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Enhancing Human-Centric Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00115/) (2024)
- [Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16331/) (2024)
- [Portrait4D-v2: Pseudo Multi-View Data Creates Better 4D Head Synthesizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13570/) (2024)
- [MagicStick: Controllable Video Editing via Control Handle Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03047/) (2023)
- [UniEdit: A Unified Tuning-Free Framework for Video Motion and Appearance Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13185/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster: Towards Efficient, Fine-Controllable, and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16630/) (2025)
- [FLOAT: Generative Motion Latent Flow Matching for Audio-driven Talking Portrait](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01064/) (2024)
- [MEMO: Memory-Guided Diffusion for Expressive Talking Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04448/) (2024)
- [OmniHuman-1.5: Instilling an Active Mind in Avatars via Cognitive Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19209/) (2025)
- [InterActHuman: Multi-Concept Human Animation with Layout-Aligned Audio Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09984/) (2025)
- [X-Streamer: Unified Human World Modeling with Audiovisual Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21574/) (2025)
- [DreamTalk: When Emotional Talking Head Generation Meets Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09767/) (2023)
- [InstructAvatar: Text-Guided Emotion and Motion Control for Avatar Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15758/) (2024)
- [EmotiveTalk: Expressive Talking Head Generation through Audio Information Decoupling and Emotional Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16726/) (2024)
- [Teller: Real-Time Streaming Audio-Driven Portrait Animation with Autoregressive Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18429/) (2025)
- [VidTwin: Video VAE with Decoupled Structure and Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17726/) (2024)
- [KlingAvatar 2.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13313/) (2025)
- [MobilePortrait: Real-Time One-Shot Neural Head Avatars on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05712/) (2024)
- [MoEE: Mixture of Emotion Experts for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01808/) (2025)
- [MoDiTalker: Motion-Disentangled Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19144/) (2024)
- [DAWN: Dynamic Frame Avatar with Non-autoregressive Diffusion Framework for Talking Head Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13726/) (2024)
- [Playmate: Flexible Control of Portrait Animation via 3D-Implicit Space Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07203/) (2025)
- [Make Your Actor Talk: Generalizable and High-Fidelity Lip Sync with Motion and Appearance Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08096/) (2024)
- [PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02657/) (2024)
- [Takin-ADA: Emotion Controllable Audio-Driven Animation with Canonical and Landmark Loss Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14283/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot talking avatar generation aims at synthesizing natural talking videos from speech and a single portrait image. Previous methods have relied on domain-specific heuristics such as warping-based motion representation and 3D Morphable Models, which limit the naturalness and diversity of the generated avatars. In this work, we introduce GAIA (Generative AI for Avatar), which eliminates the domain priors in talking avatar generation. In light of the observation that the speech only drives the motion of the avatar while the appearance of the avatar and the background typically remain the same throughout the entire video, we divide our approach into two stages: 1) disentangling each frame into motion and appearance representations; 2) generating motion sequences conditioned on the speech and reference portrait image. We collect a large-scale high-quality talking avatar dataset and train the model on it with different scales (up to 2B parameters). Experimental results verify the superiority, scalability, and flexibility of GAIA as 1) the resulting model beats previous baseline models in terms of naturalness, diversity, lip-sync quality, and visual quality; 2) the framework is scalable since larger models yield better results; 3) it is general and enables different applications like controllable talking avatar generation and text-instructed avatar generation.