# A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Analysis of Talking Head Synthesis: Techniques for Portrait Generation, Driving Mechanisms, and Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 144 of its 197 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 144)

- [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)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [OmniSync: Towards Universal Lip Synchronization via Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21448/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03883/) (2025)
- [Advancing Talking Head Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Multi-Modal Methodologies, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Loss Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02900/) (2025)
- [LawDNet: Enhanced Audio-Driven Lip Synthesis via Local Affine Warping Deformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09326/) (2024)
- [Ariadne's Thread of LipSync: Unraveling Forgeries via Inconsistency between Lip Motions and Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08417/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Talking head synthesis, an advanced method for generating portrait videos from a still image driven by specific content, has garnered widespread attention in virtual reality, augmented reality and game production. Recently, significant breakthroughs have been made with the introduction of novel models such as the transformer and the diffusion model. Current methods can not only generate new content but also edit the generated material. This survey systematically reviews the technology, categorizing it into three pivotal domains: portrait generation, driven mechanisms, and editing techniques. We summarize milestone studies and critically analyze their innovations and shortcomings within each domain. Additionally, we organize an extensive collection of datasets and provide a thorough performance analysis of current methodologies based on various evaluation metrics, aiming to furnish a clear framework and robust data support for future research. Finally, we explore application scenarios of talking head synthesis, illustrate them with specific cases, and examine potential future directions.