# FantasyTalking: Realistic Talking Portrait Generation via Coherent Motion Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 77 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation by Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17440/) (2024)
- [Nonlinear 3D Face Morphable Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03786/) (2018)
- [Loopy: Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02634/) (2024)
- [Hallo2: Long-Duration and High-Resolution Audio-Driven Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07718/) (2024)
- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [EasyAnimate: High-Performance Video Generation Framework with Hybrid Windows Attention and Reward Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18991/) (2024)
- [SkyReels-A1: Expressive Portrait Animation in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10841/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [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)
- [Wan-S2V: Audio-Driven Cinematic Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18621/) (2025)
- [UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06155/) (2025)
- [HuMo: Human-Centric Video Generation via Collaborative Multi-Modal Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08519/) (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)
- [EchoMimicV3: 1.3B Parameters are All You Need for Unified Multi-Modal and Multi-Task Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03905/) (2025)
- [StreamAvatar: Streaming Diffusion Models for Real-Time Interactive Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22065/) (2025)
- [Paper2Video: Automatic Video Generation from Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05096/) (2025)
- [Kling-Avatar: Grounding Multimodal Instructions for Cascaded Long-Duration Avatar Animation Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09595/) (2025)
- [AnyTalker: Scaling Multi-Person Talking Video Generation with Interactivity Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23475/) (2025)
- [DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12160/) (2026)
- [X-Streamer: Unified Human World Modeling with Audiovisual Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21574/) (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)
- [FantasyPortrait: Enhancing Multi-Character Portrait Animation with Expression-Augmented Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12956/) (2025)
- [KlingAvatar 2.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13313/) (2025)
- [Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21734/) (2025)
- [VideoVeritas: AI-Generated Video Detection via Perception Pretext Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08828/) (2026)
- [InfinityHuman: Towards Long-Term Audio-Driven Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20210/) (2025)
- [LiveTalk: Real-Time Multimodal Interactive Video Diffusion via Improved On-Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23576/) (2025)
- [AlignHuman: Improving Motion and Fidelity via Timestep-Segment Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11144/) (2025)
- [Playmate2: Training-Free Multi-Character Audio-Driven Animation via Diffusion Transformer with Reward Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12089/) (2025)
- [OmniShow: Unifying Multimodal Conditions for Human-Object Interaction Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11804/) (2026)
- [Syncphony: Synchronized Audio-to-Video Generation with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21893/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Creating a realistic animatable avatar from a single static portrait remains challenging. Existing approaches often struggle to capture subtle facial expressions, the associated global body movements, and the dynamic background. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that leverages a pretrained video diffusion transformer model to generate high-fidelity, coherent talking portraits with controllable motion dynamics. At the core of our work is a dual-stage audio-visual alignment strategy. In the first stage, we employ a clip-level training scheme to establish coherent global motion by aligning audio-driven dynamics across the entire scene, including the reference portrait, contextual objects, and background. In the second stage, we refine lip movements at the frame level using a lip-tracing mask, ensuring precise synchronization with audio signals. To preserve identity without compromising motion flexibility, we replace the commonly used reference network with a facial-focused cross-attention module that effectively maintains facial consistency throughout the video. Furthermore, we integrate a motion intensity modulation module that explicitly controls expression and body motion intensity, enabling controllable manipulation of portrait movements beyond mere lip motion. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves higher quality with better realism, coherence, motion intensity, and identity preservation. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-talking/.
