# Model See Model Do: Speech-Driven Facial Animation with Style Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2025.

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

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (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)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02379/) (2023)
- [EmoTalk: Speech-Driven Emotional Disentanglement for 3D Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11089/) (2023)
- [Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08990/) (2023)
- [Optimizing Diffusion Noise Can Serve As Universal Motion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11994/) (2023)
- [ZeroEGGS: Zero-shot Example-based Gesture Generation from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07556/) (2022)
- [DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00434/) (2023)
- [Imitator: Personalized Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00023/) (2022)
- [Learning latent representations for style control and transfer in end-to-end speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04342/) (2018)
- [Media2Face: Co-speech Facial Animation Generation With Multi-Modality Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15687/) (2024)
- [TalkCLIP: Talking Head Generation with Text-Guided Expressive Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00334/) (2023)
- [Transflower: probabilistic autoregressive dance generation with multimodal attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13871/) (2021)
- [Daft-Exprt: Cross-Speaker Prosody Transfer on Any Text for Expressive Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02271/) (2021)

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

- [DiffDecompose: Layer-Wise Decomposition of Alpha-Composited Images via Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21541/) (2025)
- [UMo: Unified Sparse Motion Modeling for Real-Time Co-Speech Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14731/) (2026)
- [Personalizing Causal Audio-Driven Facial Motion via Dynamic Multi-modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23692/) (2026)
- [CapTalk: Text-Guided Stylization and Speech-Driven 3D Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29316/) (2026)
- [TokTalk: Expressive Real-time Facial Animation from Audio-LLM Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31294/) (2026)
- [KM-Speaker: Keypoint-Based Style Control for High-Quality Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation and Dialogue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28568/) (2026)
- [Seeing Speech: Learning Visible Articulatory Dynamics for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30517/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech-driven 3D facial animation plays a key role in applications such as virtual avatars, gaming, and digital content creation. While existing methods have made significant progress in achieving accurate lip synchronization and generating basic emotional expressions, they often struggle to capture and effectively transfer nuanced performance styles. We propose a novel example-based generation framework that conditions a latent diffusion model on a reference style clip to produce highly expressive and temporally coherent facial animations. To address the challenge of accurately adhering to the style reference, we introduce a novel conditioning mechanism called style basis, which extracts key poses from the reference and additively guides the diffusion generation process to fit the style without compromising lip synchronization quality. This approach enables the model to capture subtle stylistic cues while ensuring that the generated animations align closely with the input speech. Extensive qualitative, quantitative, and perceptual evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in faithfully reproducing the desired style while achieving superior lip synchronization across various speech scenarios.