# EmoTalk3D: High-Fidelity Free-View Synthesis of Emotional 3D Talking Head

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (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)
- [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)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [FaceScape: a Large-scale High Quality 3D Face Dataset and Detailed Riggable 3D Face Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13989/) (2020)
- [Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04160/) (2019)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13430/) (2023)
- [Next3D: Generative Neural Texture Rasterization for 3D-Aware Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11208/) (2022)
- [Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07786/) (2022)
- [You said that?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02966/) (2017)
- [Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08990/) (2023)
- [Learning Dynamic Facial Radiance Fields for Few-Shot Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11770/) (2022)
- [Real3D-Portrait: One-shot Realistic 3D Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08503/) (2024)
- [MoFaNeRF: Morphable Facial Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02308/) (2021)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [FATE: Full-head Gaussian Avatar with Textural Editing from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15604/) (2024)
- [A Review of Human Emotion Synthesis Based on Generative Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07116/) (2024)
- [Towards Native Generative Model for 3D Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01226/) (2024)
- [Audio Driven Real-Time Facial Animation for Social Telepresence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01176/) (2025)
- [GGTalker: Talking Head Systhesis with Generalizable Gaussian Priors and Identity-Specific Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21513/) (2025)
- [EmoTaG: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Synthesis on Gaussian Splatting with Few-Shot Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21332/) (2026)
- [When Words Smile: Generating Diverse Emotional Facial Expressions from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02508/) (2024)
- [ESGaussianFace: Emotional and Stylized Audio-Driven Facial Animation via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01847/) (2026)
- [EmoCAST: Emotional Talking Portrait via Emotive Text Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20615/) (2025)
- [EmoDiffTalk:Emotion-aware Diffusion for Editable 3D Gaussian Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05991/) (2025)
- [ViewMask-1-to-3: Multi-View Consistent Image Generation via Multimodal Discrete Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14099/) (2025)
- [PASE: Phoneme-Aware Speech Encoder to Improve Lip Sync Accuracy for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05803/) (2025)
- [Giving Faces Their Feelings Back: Explicit Emotion Control for Feedforward Single-Image 3D Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14541/) (2026)
- [Personalizing Causal Audio-Driven Facial Motion via Dynamic Multi-modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23692/) (2026)
- [EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15848/) (2026)
- [UVFaceFusion: Fast Multi-view Topologically Consistent Face Reconstruction in the Wild via UV-space Neural Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18798/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D talking heads with controllable emotion, featuring enhanced lip synchronization and rendering quality. Despite significant progress in the field, prior methods still suffer from multi-view consistency and a lack of emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we collect EmoTalk3D dataset with calibrated multi-view videos, emotional annotations, and per-frame 3D geometry. By training on the EmoTalk3D dataset, we propose a textit`Speech-to-Geometry-to-Appearance' mapping framework that first predicts faithful 3D geometry sequence from the audio features, then the appearance of a 3D talking head represented by 4D Gaussians is synthesized from the predicted geometry. The appearance is further disentangled into canonical and dynamic Gaussians, learned from multi-view videos, and fused to render free-view talking head animation. Moreover, our model enables controllable emotion in the generated talking heads and can be rendered in wide-range views. Our method exhibits improved rendering quality and stability in lip motion generation while capturing dynamic facial details such as wrinkles and subtle expressions. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-fidelity and emotion-controllable 3D talking heads. The code and EmoTalk3D dataset are released at https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/EmoTalk3D.