# UniAvatar: Taming Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation with Comprehensive Motion and Lighting Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19860/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Dec 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [MotionStrata: Hierarchical Motion Latents for Compact Video Autoencoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07136/) (2025)
- [DyStream: Streaming Dyadic Talking Heads Generation via Flow Matching-based Autoregressive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24408/) (2025)
- [CogPortrait: Fine-Grained Eye-Region Control in Portrait Animation via Hierarchical Agent Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28056/) (2026)
- [A Self-supervised Motion Representation for Portrait Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10096/) (2025)
- [ChronoTailor: Harnessing Attention Guidance for Fine-Grained Video Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05858/) (2025)
- [JOLT3D: Joint Learning of Talking Heads and 3DMM Parameters with Application to Lip-Sync](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20452/) (2025)
- [Token Painter: Training-Free Text-Guided Image Inpainting via Mask Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23919/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, animating portrait images using audio input is a popular task. Creating lifelike talking head videos requires flexible and natural movements, including facial and head dynamics, camera motion, realistic light and shadow effects. Existing methods struggle to offer comprehensive, multifaceted control over these aspects. In this work, we introduce UniAvatar, a designed method that provides extensive control over a wide range of motion and illumination conditions. Specifically, we use the FLAME model to render all motion information onto a single image, maintaining the integrity of 3D motion details while enabling fine-grained, pixel-level control. Beyond motion, this approach also allows for comprehensive global illumination control. We design independent modules to manage both 3D motion and illumination, permitting separate and combined control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms others in both broad-range motion control and lighting control. Additionally, to enhance the diversity of motion and environmental contexts in current datasets, we collect and plan to publicly release two datasets, DH-FaceDrasMvVid-100 and DH-FaceReliVid-200, which capture significant head movements during speech and various lighting scenarios.