# JEAN: Joint Expression and Audio-guided NeRF-based Talking Face Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12156 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12156/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [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)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Disentangling by Factorising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/) (2018)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Space-time Neural Irradiance Fields for Free-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12950/) (2020)
- [Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.5567/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04098/) (2021)
- [Disentangled and Controllable Face Image Generation via 3D Imitative-Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11660/) (2020)
- [Towards Fast, Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09960/) (2020)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08379/) (2021)
- [Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04160/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LES-Talker: Fine-Grained Emotion Editing for Talking Head Generation in Linear Emotion Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09268/) (2024)
- [Mask-Free Audio-driven Talking Face Generation for Enhanced Visual Quality and Identity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20953/) (2025)
- [Low-Rank Head Avatar Personalization with Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01935/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a novel method for joint expression and audio-guided talking face generation. Recent approaches either struggle to preserve the speaker identity or fail to produce faithful facial expressions. To address these challenges, we propose a NeRF-based network. Since we train our network on monocular videos without any ground truth, it is essential to learn disentangled representations for audio and expression. We first learn audio features in a self-supervised manner, given utterances from multiple subjects. By incorporating a contrastive learning technique, we ensure that the learned audio features are aligned to the lip motion and disentangled from the muscle motion of the rest of the face. We then devise a transformer-based architecture that learns expression features, capturing long-range facial expressions and disentangling them from the speech-specific mouth movements. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-fidelity talking face videos, achieving state-of-the-art facial expression transfer along with lip synchronization to unseen audio.