# Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16331 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16331/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2024.

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

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)
- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [MCVD: Masked Conditional Video Diffusion for Prediction, Generation, and Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09853/) (2022)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08801/) (2024)
- [EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08136/) (2024)
- [AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17694/) (2024)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12346/) (2023)
- [StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04036/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [HunyuanCustom: A Multimodal-Driven Architecture for Customized Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04512/) (2025)
- [OmniAvatar: Efficient Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation with Adaptive Body Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18866/) (2025)
- [HunyuanVideo-Avatar: High-Fidelity Audio-Driven Human Animation for Multiple Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20156/) (2025)
- [Let Them Talk: Audio-Driven Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22647/) (2025)
- [StableAvatar: Infinite-Length Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08248/) (2025)
- [InfiniteTalk: Audio-driven Video Generation for Sparse-Frame Video Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14033/) (2025)
- [MoCha: Towards Movie-Grade Talking Character Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23307/) (2025)
- [OmniSync: Towards Universal Lip Synchronization via Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21448/) (2025)
- [StreamAvatar: Streaming Diffusion Models for Real-Time Interactive Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22065/) (2025)
- [AnyTalker: Scaling Multi-Person Talking Video Generation with Interactivity Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23475/) (2025)
- [Hallo4: High-Fidelity Dynamic Portrait Animation via Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23525/) (2025)
- [SkyReels-Audio: Omni Audio-Conditioned Talking Portraits in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00830/) (2025)
- [HunyuanVideo-HOMA: Generic Human-Object Interaction in Multimodal Driven Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08797/) (2025)
- [Hallo-Live: Real-Time Streaming Joint Audio-Video Avatar Generation with Asynchronous Dual-Stream and Human-Centric Preference Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23632/) (2026)
- [Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19537/) (2024)
- [MAVOS-DD: Multilingual Audio-Video Open-Set Deepfake Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11109/) (2025)
- [PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11253/) (2025)
- [Playmate: Flexible Control of Portrait Animation via 3D-Implicit Space Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07203/) (2025)
- [OracleFusion: Assisting the Decipherment of Oracle Bone Script with Structurally Constrained Semantic Typography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21101/) (2025)
- [Playmate2: Training-Free Multi-Character Audio-Driven Animation via Diffusion Transformer with Reward Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12089/) (2025)
- [Beyond Face Swapping: A Diffusion-Based Digital Human Benchmark for Multimodal Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16512/) (2025)
- [FeRA: Frequency-Energy Constrained Routing for Effective Diffusion Adaptation Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17979/) (2025)
- [PC-Talk: Precise Facial Animation Control for Audio-Driven Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14295/) (2025)
- [Bind-Your-Avatar: Multi-Talking-Character Video Generation with Dynamic 3D-mask-based Embedding Router](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19833/) (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)
- [Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26165/) (2025)
- [FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16900/) (2025)
- [DyStream: Streaming Dyadic Talking Heads Generation via Flow Matching-based Autoregressive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24408/) (2025)
- [AVControl: Efficient Framework for Training Audio-Visual Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24793/) (2026)
- [Lookahead Anchoring: Preserving Character Identity in Audio-Driven Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23581/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The study of talking face generation mainly explores the intricacies of synchronizing facial movements and crafting visually appealing, temporally-coherent animations. However, due to the limited exploration of global audio perception, current approaches predominantly employ auxiliary visual and spatial knowledge to stabilize the movements, which often results in the deterioration of the naturalness and temporal inconsistencies.Considering the essence of audio-driven animation, the audio signal serves as the ideal and unique priors to adjust facial expressions and lip movements, without resorting to interference of any visual signals. Based on this motivation, we propose a novel paradigm, dubbed as Sonic, to shift focus on the exploration of global audio perception.To effectively leverage global audio knowledge, we disentangle it into intra- and inter-clip audio perception and collaborate with both aspects to enhance overall perception.For the intra-clip audio perception, 1). Context-enhanced audio learning, in which long-range intra-clip temporal audio knowledge is extracted to provide facial expression and lip motion priors implicitly expressed as the tone and speed of speech. 2). Motion-decoupled controller, in which the motion of the head and expression movement are disentangled and independently controlled by intra-audio clips. Most importantly, for inter-clip audio perception, as a bridge to connect the intra-clips to achieve the global perception, Time-aware position shift fusion, in which the global inter-clip audio information is considered and fused for long-audio inference via through consecutively time-aware shifted windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the novel audio-driven paradigm outperform existing SOTA methodologies in terms of video quality, temporally consistency, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity.