# Advancing Talking Head Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Multi-Modal Methodologies, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Loss Functions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02900 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02900/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 145 of its 220 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 145)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (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)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [StyleNeRF: A Style-based 3D-Aware Generator for High-resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08985/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Fundamentals of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03314/) (2018)
- [Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02612/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07909/) (2023)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Disentangled and Controllable Face Image Generation via 3D Imitative-Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11660/) (2020)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [TempoSyncDiff: Distilled Temporally-Consistent Diffusion for Low-Latency Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06057/) (2026)
- [ALIVE: An Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine with Content-Aware Retrieval for Real-Time Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20858/) (2025)
- [VineetVC: Adaptive Video Conferencing Under Severe Bandwidth Constraints Using Audio-Driven Talking-Head Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12758/) (2026)
- [Bootstrapping Audiovisual Speech Recognition in Zero-AV-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08249/) (2026)
- [PrivFedTalk: Privacy-Aware Federated Diffusion with Identity-Stable Adapters for Personalized Talking-Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08037/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Large Language Model-Enabled Video Translation: A Role-Oriented Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11283/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Talking Head Generation (THG) has emerged as a transformative technology in computer vision, enabling the synthesis of realistic human faces synchronized with image, audio, text, or video inputs. This paper provides a comprehensive review of methodologies and frameworks for talking head generation, categorizing approaches into 2D--based, 3D--based, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)--based, diffusion--based, parameter-driven techniques and many other techniques. It evaluates algorithms, datasets, and evaluation metrics while highlighting advancements in perceptual realism and technical efficiency critical for applications such as digital avatars, video dubbing, ultra-low bitrate video conferencing, and online education. The study identifies challenges such as reliance on pre--trained models, extreme pose handling, multilingual synthesis, and temporal consistency. Future directions include modular architectures, multilingual datasets, hybrid models blending pre--trained and task-specific layers, and innovative loss functions. By synthesizing existing research and exploring emerging trends, this paper aims to provide actionable insights for researchers and practitioners in the field of talking head generation. For the complete survey, code, and curated resource list, visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/VineetKumarRakesh/thg.