# RealTalk: Real-time and Realistic Audio-driven Face Generation with 3D Facial Prior-guided Identity Alignment Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2024.

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

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)
- [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)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VideoReTalking: Audio-based Lip Synchronization for Talking Head Video Editing In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14758/) (2022)
- [Seeing What You Said: Talking Face Generation Guided by a Lip Reading Expert](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17480/) (2023)
- [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)
- [StyleTalk: One-shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01081/) (2023)
- [FACIAL: Synthesizing Dynamic Talking Face with Implicit Attribute Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07938/) (2021)
- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [DINet: Deformation Inpainting Network for Realistic Face Visually Dubbing on High Resolution Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03988/) (2023)
- [SyncTalkFace: Talking Face Generation with Precise Lip-Syncing via Audio-Lip Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00924/) (2022)
- [Face Super-Resolution Guided by 3D Facial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09454/) (2020)
- [High-fidelity Generalized Emotional Talking Face Generation with Multi-modal Emotion Space Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02572/) (2023)
- [Masked Lip-Sync Prediction by Audio-Visual Contextual Exploitation in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04970/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16331/) (2024)
- [Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03883/) (2025)
- [SEGA: Drivable 3D Gaussian Head Avatar from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14373/) (2025)
- [FeRA: Frequency-Energy Constrained Routing for Effective Diffusion Adaptation Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17979/) (2025)
- [Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26165/) (2025)
- [TalkCuts: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-Shot Human Speech Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07249/) (2025)
- [RSATalker: Realistic Socially-Aware Talking Head Generation for Multi-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10606/) (2026)
- [Comparative Analysis of Audio Feature Extraction for Real-Time Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13209/) (2024)
- [EditEmoTalk: Controllable Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Continuous Expression Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10000/) (2026)
- [JOLT3D: Joint Learning of Talking Heads and 3DMM Parameters with Application to Lip-Sync](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20452/) (2025)
- [StableDub: Taming Diffusion Prior for Generalized and Efficient Visual Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21887/) (2025)
- [StreamWise: Serving Multi-Modal Generation in Real-Time at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05800/) (2026)
- [MindFlow: Harmonizing Cognitive Semantics and Acoustic Dynamics for Facial Animation Generation in Dyadic Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27779/) (2026)
- [CETalk: Continuous Valence-Arousal Control for Audio-Driven 3D Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15110/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person-generic audio-driven face generation is a challenging task in computer vision. Previous methods have achieved remarkable progress in audio-visual synchronization, but there is still a significant gap between current results and practical applications. The challenges are two-fold: 1) Preserving unique individual traits for achieving high-precision lip synchronization. 2) Generating high-quality facial renderings in real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized audio-driven framework RealTalk, which consists of an audio-to-expression transformer and a high-fidelity expression-to-face renderer. In the first component, we consider both identity and intra-personal variation features related to speaking lip movements. By incorporating cross-modal attention on the enriched facial priors, we can effectively align lip movements with audio, thus attaining greater precision in expression prediction. In the second component, we design a lightweight facial identity alignment (FIA) module which includes a lip-shape control structure and a face texture reference structure. This novel design allows us to generate fine details in real-time, without depending on sophisticated and inefficient feature alignment modules. Our experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, on public datasets demonstrate the clear advantages of our method in terms of lip-speech synchronization and generation quality. Furthermore, our method is efficient and requires fewer computational resources, making it well-suited to meet the needs of practical applications.