# FantasyPortrait: Enhancing Multi-Character Portrait Animation with Expression-Augmented Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12956 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12956/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 44 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [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)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [CurricularFace: Adaptive Curriculum Learning Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00288/) (2020)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [CogVLM2: Visual Language Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16500/) (2024)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation by Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17440/) (2024)
- [MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07621/) (2022)
- [Phantom: Subject-consistent video generation via cross-modal alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11079/) (2025)
- [Hallo3: Highly Dynamic and Realistic Portrait Image Animation with Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00733/) (2024)
- [CamI2V: Camera-Controlled Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15957/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Flying Object Detection with YOLOv8](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09972/) (2023)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)
- [X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15931/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [AnyTalker: Scaling Multi-Person Talking Video Generation with Interactivity Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23475/) (2025)
- [PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11253/) (2025)
- [ID-Crafter: VLM-Grounded Online RL for Compositional Multi-Subject Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00511/) (2025)
- [FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16900/) (2025)
- [DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15524/) (2025)
- [SocialDirector: Training-Free Social Interaction Control for Multi-Person Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10079/) (2026)
- [FantasyTalking2: Timestep-Layer Adaptive Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11255/) (2025)
- [Soul: Breathe Life into Digital Human for High-fidelity Long-term Multimodal Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13495/) (2025)
- [PortraitDirector: A Hierarchical Disentanglement Framework for Controllable and Real-time Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19129/) (2026)
- [HelloWorld: Enabling Socially Interactive Characters in Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05070/) (2026)
- [Measuring the Unspoken: A Disentanglement Model and Benchmark for Psychological Analysis in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04728/) (2025)
- [PerformRecast: Expression and Head Pose Disentanglement for Portrait Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19731/) (2026)
- [CrossPortrait: Cross-Species Portrait Animation via Adversarial Motion Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17532/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Producing expressive facial animations from static images is a challenging task. Prior methods relying on explicit geometric priors (e.g., facial landmarks or 3DMM) often suffer from artifacts in cross reenactment and struggle to capture subtle emotions. Furthermore, existing approaches lack support for multi-character animation, as driving features from different individuals frequently interfere with one another, complicating the task. To address these challenges, we propose FantasyPortrait, a diffusion transformer based framework capable of generating high-fidelity and emotion-rich animations for both single- and multi-character scenarios. Our method introduces an expression-augmented learning strategy that utilizes implicit representations to capture identity-agnostic facial dynamics, enhancing the model's ability to render fine-grained emotions. For multi-character control, we design a masked cross-attention mechanism that ensures independent yet coordinated expression generation, effectively preventing feature interference. To advance research in this area, we propose the Multi-Expr dataset and ExprBench, which are specifically designed datasets and benchmarks for training and evaluating multi-character portrait animations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FantasyPortrait significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations, excelling particularly in challenging cross reenactment and multi-character contexts. Our project page is https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-portrait/.