# EMO2: End-Effector Guided Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01061/) (2025)
- [OmniAvatar: Efficient Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation with Adaptive Body Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18866/) (2025)
- [Let Them Talk: Audio-Driven Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22647/) (2025)
- [Wan-S2V: Audio-Driven Cinematic Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18621/) (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)
- [OmniHuman-1.5: Instilling an Active Mind in Avatars via Cognitive Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19209/) (2025)
- [MoCha: Towards Movie-Grade Talking Character Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23307/) (2025)
- [Kling-Avatar: Grounding Multimodal Instructions for Cascaded Long-Duration Avatar Animation Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09595/) (2025)
- [InterActHuman: Multi-Concept Human Animation with Layout-Aligned Audio Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09984/) (2025)
- [MIDAS: Multimodal Interactive Digital-humAn Synthesis via Real-time Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19320/) (2025)
- [DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18078/) (2025)
- [KlingAvatar 2.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13313/) (2025)
- [ChatAnyone: Stylized Real-time Portrait Video Generation with Hierarchical Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21144/) (2025)
- [AlignHuman: Improving Motion and Fidelity via Timestep-Segment Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11144/) (2025)
- [Bind-Your-Avatar: Multi-Talking-Character Video Generation with Dynamic 3D-mask-based Embedding Router](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19833/) (2025)
- [AvatarForcing: One-Step Streaming Talking Avatars via Local-Future Sliding-Window Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14331/) (2026)
- [InstructAV2AV: Instruction-Guided Audio-Video Joint Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18467/) (2026)
- [MoSA: Motion-Coherent Human Video Generation via Structure-Appearance Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17404/) (2025)
- [JAM-Flow: Joint Audio-Motion Synthesis with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23552/) (2025)
- [X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02944/) (2025)
- [TalkVerse: Democratizing Minute-Long Audio-Driven Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14938/) (2025)
- [Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17248/) (2026)
- [ControlHair: Synergizing Physics Simulator and Video Diffusion for Controllable Dynamic Hair Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21541/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Intelligence in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04045/) (2026)
- [Input-Aware Sparse Attention for Real-Time Co-Speech Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02617/) (2025)
- [VividAnimator: An End-to-End Audio and Pose-driven Half-Body Human Animation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10269/) (2025)
- [JoyStreamer: Unlocking Highly Expressive Avatars via Harmonized Text-Audio Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00702/) (2026)
- [MoDA: Multi-modal Diffusion Architecture for Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03256/) (2025)
- [DISPLAY: Directable Human-Object Interaction Video Generation via Sparse Motion Guidance and Multi-Task Auxiliary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09883/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a novel audio-driven talking head method capable of simultaneously generating highly expressive facial expressions and hand gestures. Unlike existing methods that focus on generating full-body or half-body poses, we investigate the challenges of co-speech gesture generation and identify the weak correspondence between audio features and full-body gestures as a key limitation. To address this, we redefine the task as a two-stage process. In the first stage, we generate hand poses directly from audio input, leveraging the strong correlation between audio signals and hand movements. In the second stage, we employ a diffusion model to synthesize video frames, incorporating the hand poses generated in the first stage to produce realistic facial expressions and body movements. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, such as CyberHost and Vlogger, in terms of both visual quality and synchronization accuracy. This work provides a new perspective on audio-driven gesture generation and a robust framework for creating expressive and natural talking head animations.