# GaussianTalker: Speaker-specific Talking Head Synthesis via 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14037 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14037/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (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)
- [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)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [X2Face: A network for controlling face generation by using images, audio, and pose codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10550/) (2018)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [Realistic Speech-Driven Facial Animation with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06337/) (2019)
- [GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13430/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07786/) (2022)
- [Identity-Preserving Talking Face Generation with Landmark and Appearance Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08293/) (2023)
- [Learning Dynamic Facial Radiance Fields for Few-Shot Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11770/) (2022)
- [Simple and Effective Zero-shot Cross-lingual Phoneme Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11680/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction by Occlusion-Aware Multi-view Geometry Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12494/) (2020)
- [DINet: Deformation Inpainting Network for Realistic Face Visually Dubbing on High Resolution Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03988/) (2023)
- [Efficient Region-Aware Neural Radiance Fields for High-Fidelity Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09323/) (2023)
- [Fast Optical Flow using Dense Inverse Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03590/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [DashGaussian: Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting in 200 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18402/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03883/) (2025)
- [InsTaG: Learning Personalized 3D Talking Head from Few-Second Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20387/) (2025)
- [DEGAS: Detailed Expressions on Full-Body Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10588/) (2024)
- [Monocular and Generalizable Gaussian Talking Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00665/) (2025)
- [SyncTalk++: High-Fidelity and Efficient Synchronized Talking Heads Synthesis Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14742/) (2025)
- [ChatAnyone: Stylized Real-time Portrait Video Generation with Hierarchical Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21144/) (2025)
- [DEGSTalk: Decomposed Per-Embedding Gaussian Fields for Hair-Preserving Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20148/) (2024)
- [Advancing Talking Head Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Multi-Modal Methodologies, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Loss Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02900/) (2025)
- [Audio Driven Real-Time Facial Animation for Social Telepresence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01176/) (2025)
- [MixedGaussianAvatar: Realistically and Geometrically Accurate Head Avatar via Mixed 2D-3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04955/) (2024)
- [GGTalker: Talking Head Systhesis with Generalizable Gaussian Priors and Identity-Specific Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21513/) (2025)
- [CoInteract: Physically-Consistent Human-Object Interaction Video Synthesis via Spatially-Structured Co-Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19636/) (2026)
- [GaussianHeadTalk: Wobble-Free 3D Talking Heads with Audio Driven Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10939/) (2025)
- [ESGaussianFace: Emotional and Stylized Audio-Driven Facial Animation via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01847/) (2026)
- [Lipschitz-Driven Noise Robustness in VQ-AE for High-Frequency Texture Repair in ID-Specific Talking Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00990/) (2024)
- [LES-Talker: Fine-Grained Emotion Editing for Talking Head Generation in Linear Emotion Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09268/) (2024)
- [Joint Learning of Depth and Appearance for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08649/) (2025)
- [VisualSpeaker: Visually-Guided 3D Avatar Lip Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06060/) (2025)
- [See the Speaker: Crafting High-Resolution Talking Faces from Speech with Prior Guidance and Region Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26819/) (2025)
- [Splat-Portrait: Generalizing Talking Heads with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18633/) (2026)
- [Talking Together: Synthesizing Co-Located 3D Conversations from Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08674/) (2026)
- [FHAvatar: Fast and High-Fidelity Reconstruction of Face-and-Hair Composable 3D Head Avatar from Few Casual Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23345/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent works on audio-driven talking head synthesis using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved impressive results. However, due to inadequate pose and expression control caused by NeRF implicit representation, these methods still have some limitations, such as unsynchronized or unnatural lip movements, and visual jitter and artifacts. In this paper, we propose GaussianTalker, a novel method for audio-driven talking head synthesis based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. With the explicit representation property of 3D Gaussians, intuitive control of the facial motion is achieved by binding Gaussians to 3D facial models. GaussianTalker consists of two modules, Speaker-specific Motion Translator and Dynamic Gaussian Renderer. Speaker-specific Motion Translator achieves accurate lip movements specific to the target speaker through universalized audio feature extraction and customized lip motion generation. Dynamic Gaussian Renderer introduces Speaker-specific BlendShapes to enhance facial detail representation via a latent pose, delivering stable and realistic rendered videos. Extensive experimental results suggest that GaussianTalker outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in talking head synthesis, delivering precise lip synchronization and exceptional visual quality. Our method achieves rendering speeds of 130 FPS on NVIDIA RTX4090 GPU, significantly exceeding the threshold for real-time rendering performance, and can potentially be deployed on other hardware platforms.