mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Exploring Timeline Control for Facial Motion Generation

arXiv 2505.20861 ↗First posted 27 May 2025cs.CVcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a new control signal for facial motion generation: timeline control. Compared to audio and text signals, timelines provide more fine-grained control, such as generating specific facial motions with precise timing. Users can specify a multi-track timeline of facial actions arranged in temporal intervals, allowing precise control over the timing of each action. To model the timeline control capability, We first annotate the time intervals of facial actions in natural facial motion sequences at a frame-level granularity. This process is facilitated by Toeplitz Inverse Covariance-based Clustering to minimize human labor. Based on the annotations, we propose a diffusion-based generation model capable of generating facial motions that are natural and accurately aligned with input timelines. Our method supports text-guided motion generation by using ChatGPT to convert text into timelines. Experimental results show that our method can annotate facial action intervals with satisfactory accuracy, and produces natural facial motions accurately aligned with timelines.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 52 of its 65 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

Builds on

52 of 65 references.

References · 52

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
  3. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  4. 2019AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapescited by 1,236
  5. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulatorscited by 881
  6. 2020A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wildcited by 672
  7. 2020Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motionscited by 441
  8. 2022SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animationcited by 382
  9. 2023Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Priorcited by 357
  10. 2016The KIT Motion-Language Datasetcited by 338
  11. 2019Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Stylescited by 259
  12. 2024EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditionscited by 235
38 more
  1. 2021FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformerscited by 209
  2. 2024Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animationcited by 202
  3. 2024EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditionscited by 196
  4. 2024AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animationcited by 194
  5. 2024VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Timecited by 187
  6. 2023CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Priorcited by 184
  7. 2022TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humanscited by 176
  8. 2023EmoTalk: Speech-Driven Emotional Disentanglement for 3D Face Animationcited by 142
  9. 2023GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesiscited by 131
  10. 2023CelebV-Text: A Large-Scale Facial Text-Video Datasetcited by 104
  11. 2024Loopy: Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependencycited by 102
  12. 2022FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Datasetcited by 98
  13. 2023Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglementcited by 98
  14. 2024Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generationcited by 91
  15. 2024From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversationscited by 82
  16. 2023DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Modelscited by 81
  17. 2024Seamless Human Motion Composition with Blended Positional Encodingscited by 80
  18. 2024EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesiscited by 80
  19. 2024TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splattingcited by 60
  20. 2022Talking Head Generation with Probabilistic Audio-to-Visual Diffusion Priorscited by 55
  21. 2023FaceTalk: Audio-Driven Motion Diffusion for Neural Parametric Head Modelscited by 55
  22. 2017Toeplitz Inverse Covariance-Based Clustering of Multivariate Time Series Datacited by 47
  23. 2023GAIA: Zero-shot Talking Avatar Generationcited by 43
  24. 2024Media2Face: Co-speech Facial Animation Generation With Multi-Modality Guidancecited by 39
  25. 2023Affective Faces for Goal-Driven Dyadic Communicationcited by 35
  26. 2023TalkCLIP: Talking Head Generation with Text-Guided Expressive Speaking Stylescited by 32
  27. 2024UniTalker: Scaling up Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation through A Unified Modelcited by 30
  28. 2019SAMM Long Videos: A Spontaneous Facial Micro- and Macro-Expressions Datasetcited by 25
  29. 2024ScanTalk: 3D Talking Heads from Unregistered Scanscited by 24
  30. 20213D-CNN for Facial Micro- and Macro-expression Spotting on Long Video Sequences using Temporal Oriented Reference Framecited by 16
  31. 2024ReSyncer: Rewiring Style-based Generator for Unified Audio-Visually Synced Facial Performercited by 16
  32. 2024MMHead: Towards Fine-grained Multi-modal 3D Facial Animationcited by 16
  33. 2023Probabilistic Speech-Driven 3D Facial Motion Synthesis: New Benchmarks, Methods, and Applicationscited by 15
  34. 2024PersonaTalk: Bring Attention to Your Persona in Visual Dubbingcited by 15
  35. 2024KMTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Key Motion Embeddingcited by 14
  36. 2023AgentAvatar: Disentangling Planning, Driving and Rendering for Photorealistic Avatar Agentscited by 11
  37. 2024StyleTalk++: A Unified Framework for Controlling the Speaking Styles of Talking Headscited by 11
  38. 2024Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Facial Expression Spottingcited by 4

50 most cited of 52 All 52 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 2.

4 papers.

  1. 2025StreamAvatar: Streaming Diffusion Models for Real-Time Interactive Human Avatarscited by 25
  2. 2026CogPortrait: Fine-Grained Eye-Region Control in Portrait Animation via Hierarchical Agent Planningcited by 2
  3. 2025KeyframeFace: Language-Driven Facial Animation via Semantic Keyframescited by 0
  4. 2026EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Unitscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025ChatAnyone: Stylized Real-time Portrait Video Generation with Hierarchical Motion Diffusion Model
  2. 20243DFacePolicy: Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation Based on Action Control
  3. 2022MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model
  4. 2025TalkingPose: Efficient Face and Gesture Animation with Feedback-guided Diffusion Model
  5. 2026TDMM-LM: Bridging Facial Understanding and Animation via Language Models
  6. 2023FAAC: Facial Animation Generation with Anchor Frame and Conditional Control for Superior Fidelity and Editability
  7. 2025Long-Term TalkingFace Generation via Motion-Prior Conditional Diffusion Model
  8. 2025Versatile Multimodal Controls for Expressive Talking Human Animation