# Unlock Pose Diversity: Accurate and Efficient Implicit Keypoint-based Spatiotemporal Diffusion for Audio-driven Talking Portrait

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12992/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14367/) (2022)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08379/) (2021)
- [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)
- [X2Face: A network for controlling face generation by using images, audio, and pose codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10550/) (2018)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06605/) (2022)
- [Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09043/) (2022)
- [StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04036/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [VideoReTalking: Audio-based Lip Synchronization for Talking Head Video Editing In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14758/) (2022)
- [HeadGAN: One-shot Neural Head Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08261/) (2020)
- [Real3D-Portrait: One-shot Realistic 3D Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08503/) (2024)
- [Towards Automatic Face-to-Face Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00418/) (2020)
- [One-shot Talking Face Generation from Single-speaker Audio-Visual Correlation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02749/) (2021)

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

- [EmbedTalk: Talking Head Synthesis using Gaussian Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07604/) (2026)
- [Xemo-Talker: Unlock Emotions Explicitly for Audio-Driven Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14700/) (2026)
- [Ariadne's Thread of LipSync: Unraveling Forgeries via Inconsistency between Lip Motions and Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08417/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-driven single-image talking portrait generation plays a crucial role in virtual reality, digital human creation, and filmmaking. Existing approaches are generally categorized into keypoint-based and image-based methods. Keypoint-based methods effectively preserve character identity but struggle to capture fine facial details due to the fixed points limitation of the 3D Morphable Model. Moreover, traditional generative networks face challenges in establishing causality between audio and keypoints on limited datasets, resulting in low pose diversity. In contrast, image-based approaches produce high-quality portraits with diverse details using the diffusion network but incur identity distortion and expensive computational costs. In this work, we propose KDTalker, the first framework to combine unsupervised implicit 3D keypoint with a spatiotemporal diffusion model. Leveraging unsupervised implicit 3D keypoints, KDTalker adapts facial information densities, allowing the diffusion process to model diverse head poses and capture fine facial details flexibly. The custom-designed spatiotemporal attention mechanism ensures accurate lip synchronization, producing temporally consistent, high-quality animations while enhancing computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that KDTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance regarding lip synchronization accuracy, head pose diversity, and execution efficiency.Our codes are available at https://github.com/chaolongy/KDTalker.