# FREAK: Frequency-modulated High-fidelity and Real-time Audio-driven Talking Portrait Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04067/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Global Filter Networks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00645/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators: Efficient Token Mixers for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13587/) (2021)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Focal Frequency Loss for Image Reconstruction and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12821/) (2020)
- [Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08801/) (2024)
- [AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17694/) (2024)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [Diffused Heads: Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Talking-Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03396/) (2023)
- [M2TR: Multi-modal Multi-scale Transformers for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09770/) (2021)
- [Loopy: Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02634/) (2024)
- [Seeing What You Said: Talking Face Generation Guided by a Lip Reading Expert](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17480/) (2023)
- [Identity-Preserving Talking Face Generation with Landmark and Appearance Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08293/) (2023)
- [Learning Dynamic Facial Radiance Fields for Few-Shot Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11770/) (2022)
- [StyleTalk: One-shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01081/) (2023)
- [Everybody's Talkin': Let Me Talk as You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05201/) (2020)
- [Real-time Neural Radiance Talking Portrait Synthesis via Audio-spatial Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12368/) (2022)
- [DINet: Deformation Inpainting Network for Realistic Face Visually Dubbing on High Resolution Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03988/) (2023)
- [Efficient Region-Aware Neural Radiance Fields for High-Fidelity Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09323/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Bottleneck Structure for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02269/) (2020)

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

- [CogniVerse: Revolutionizing Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Cognitive Reflection and Geometric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29602/) (2026)
- [MotionSpec: Spectral Trajectory Supervision for Motion-Consistent Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28095/) (2026)
- [CatPortrait: Taming Video Generative Models for Portrait Animation via In-context Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14957/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Achieving high-fidelity lip-speech synchronization in audio-driven talking portrait synthesis remains challenging. While multi-stage pipelines or diffusion models yield high-quality results, they suffer from high computational costs. Some approaches perform well on specific individuals with low resources, yet still exhibit mismatched lip movements. The aforementioned methods are modeled in the pixel domain. We observed that there are noticeable discrepancies in the frequency domain between the synthesized talking videos and natural videos. Currently, no research on talking portrait synthesis has considered this aspect. To address this, we propose a FREquency-modulated, high-fidelity, and real-time Audio-driven talKing portrait synthesis framework, named FREAK, which models talking portraits from the frequency domain perspective, enhancing the fidelity and naturalness of the synthesized portraits. FREAK introduces two novel frequency-based modules: 1) the Visual Encoding Frequency Modulator (VEFM) to couple multi-scale visual features in the frequency domain, better preserving visual frequency information and reducing the gap in the frequency spectrum between synthesized and natural frames. and 2) the Audio Visual Frequency Modulator (AVFM) to help the model learn the talking pattern in the frequency domain and improve audio-visual synchronization. Additionally, we optimize the model in both pixel domain and frequency domain jointly. Furthermore, FREAK supports seamless switching between one-shot and video dubbing settings, offering enhanced flexibility. Due to its superior performance, it can simultaneously support high-resolution video results and real-time inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method synthesizes high-fidelity talking portraits with detailed facial textures and precise lip synchronization in real-time, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.