# VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08764 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08764/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 69 of its 109 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14125/) (2023)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Pretrained Foundation Models: A History from BERT to ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09419/) (2023)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08801/) (2024)
- [OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01061/) (2025)
- [Hallo3: Highly Dynamic and Realistic Portrait Image Animation with Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00733/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Ditto: Motion-Space Diffusion for Controllable Realtime Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19509/) (2024)
- [CyberHost: Taming Audio-driven Avatar Diffusion Model with Region Codebook Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01876/) (2024)
- [The Dawn of Video Generation: Preliminary Explorations with SORA-like Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05227/) (2024)
- [MoCha: Towards Movie-Grade Talking Character Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23307/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03883/) (2025)
- [InterActHuman: Multi-Concept Human Animation with Layout-Aligned Audio Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09984/) (2025)
- [GRPose: Learning Graph Relations for Human Image Generation with Pose Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16540/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo-HOMA: Generic Human-Object Interaction in Multimodal Driven Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08797/) (2025)
- [MoEE: Mixture of Emotion Experts for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01808/) (2025)
- [SViMo: Synchronized Diffusion for Video and Motion Generation in Hand-object Interaction Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02444/) (2025)
- [AudCast: Audio-Driven Human Video Generation by Cascaded Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19824/) (2025)
- [JoyVASA: Portrait and Animal Image Animation with Diffusion-Based Audio-Driven Facial Dynamics and Head Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09209/) (2024)
- [Advanced Sign Language Video Generation with Compressed and Quantized Multi-Condition Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15980/) (2025)
- [ChatAnyone: Stylized Real-time Portrait Video Generation with Hierarchical Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21144/) (2025)
- [TalkCuts: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-Shot Human Speech Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07249/) (2025)
- [Video Motion Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20218/) (2025)
- [EditCtrl: Disentangled Local and Global Control for Real-Time Generative Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15031/) (2026)
- [Stereo-Talker: Audio-driven 3D Human Synthesis with Prior-Guided Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23836/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Memory for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30294/) (2026)
- [Versatile Multimodal Controls for Expressive Talking Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08714/) (2025)
- [Cosh-DiT: Co-Speech Gesture Video Synthesis via Hybrid Audio-Visual Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09942/) (2025)
- [MirrorMe: Towards Realtime and High Fidelity Audio-Driven Halfbody Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22065/) (2025)
- [TalkVerse: Democratizing Minute-Long Audio-Driven Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14938/) (2025)
- [A Unit Enhancement and Guidance Framework for Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03603/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose VLOGGER, a method for audio-driven human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion-based architecture that augments text-to-image models with both spatial and temporal controls. This supports the generation of high quality video of variable length, easily controllable through high-level representations of human faces and bodies. In contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical to correctly synthesize humans who communicate. We also curate MENTOR, a new and diverse dataset with 3d pose and expression annotations, one order of magnitude larger than previous ones (800,000 identities) and with dynamic gestures, on which we train and ablate our main technical contributions. VLOGGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in three public benchmarks, considering image quality, identity preservation and temporal consistency while also generating upper-body gestures. We analyze the performance of VLOGGER with respect to multiple diversity metrics, showing that our architectural choices and the use of MENTOR benefit training a fair and unbiased model at scale. Finally we show applications in video editing and personalization.