# SingingHead: A Large-scale 4D Dataset for Singing Head Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 121 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (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)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [HeadNeRF: A Real-time NeRF-based Parametric Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05637/) (2021)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [MMHead: Towards Fine-grained Multi-modal 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07757/) (2024)
- [Think2Sing: Orchestrating Structured Motion Subtitles for Singing-Driven 3D Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02278/) (2025)
- [Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment for AI-Generated Human-Centric Videos: Dataset and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16742/) (2026)
- [SINGER: Vivid Audio-driven Singing Video Generation with Multi-scale Spectral Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03430/) (2024)
- [Exploring Instruction Data Quality for Explainable Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03880/) (2025)
- [FMReward: Aligning and Evaluating Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15296/) (2026)
- [PCQA-R1: Advancing Generalized 3D Point Cloud Quality Assessment with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18627/) (2026)
- [InterSing: Explicit Interaction Dynamics for 3D Duet Singing Animation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04903/) (2026)
- [Hi-Singers: A Comprehensive High-Quality Dataset for Expressive Audio-Driven Singing Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22264/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Singing, as a common facial movement second only to talking, can be regarded as a universal language across ethnicities and cultures, plays an important role in emotional communication, art, and entertainment. However, it is often overlooked in the field of audio-driven facial animation due to the lack of singing head datasets and the domain gap between singing and talking in rhythm and amplitude. To this end, we collect a high-quality large-scale singing head dataset, SingingHead, which consists of more than 27 hours of synchronized singing video, 3D facial motion, singing audio, and background music from 76 individuals and 8 types of music. Along with the SingingHead dataset, we benchmark existing audio-driven 3D facial animation methods and 2D talking head methods on the singing task. Furthermore, we argue that 3D and 2D facial animation tasks can be solved together, and propose a unified singing head animation framework named UniSinger to achieve both singing audio-driven 3D singing head animation and 2D singing portrait video synthesis, which achieves competitive results on both 3D and 2D benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the proposed singing-specific dataset in promoting the development of singing head animation tasks, as well as the promising performance of our unified facial animation framework.