# RAP: Real-time Audio-driven Portrait Animation with Video Diffusion Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 34 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12688/) (2023)
- [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)
- [StableVideo: Text-driven Consistency-aware Diffusion Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09592/) (2023)
- [Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party: A Speaker-Independent Audio-Visual Model for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03619/) (2018)
- [OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01061/) (2025)
- [Hallo3: Highly Dynamic and Realistic Portrait Image Animation with Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00733/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Efficient Emotional Adaptation for Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04946/) (2023)
- [FantasyTalking: Realistic Talking Portrait Generation via Coherent Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04842/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15911/) (2026)
- [Live Avatar: Streaming Real-time Audio-Driven Avatar Generation with Infinite Length](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04677/) (2025)
- [EditYourself: Audio-Driven Generation and Manipulation of Talking Head Videos with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22127/) (2026)
- [FlashLips: 100-FPS Mask-Free Latent Lip-Sync using Reconstruction Instead of Diffusion or GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20033/) (2025)
- [EchoTorrent: Towards Swift, Sustained, and Streaming Multi-Modal Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-driven portrait animation aims to synthesize realistic and natural talking head videos from an input audio signal and a single reference image. While existing methods achieve high-quality results by leveraging high-dimensional intermediate representations and explicitly modeling motion dynamics, their computational complexity renders them unsuitable for real-time deployment. Real-time inference imposes stringent latency and memory constraints, often necessitating the use of highly compressed latent representations. However, operating in such compact spaces hinders the preservation of fine-grained spatiotemporal details, thereby complicating audio-visual synchronization RAP (Real-time Audio-driven Portrait animation), a unified framework for generating high-quality talking portraits under real-time constraints. Specifically, RAP introduces a hybrid attention mechanism for fine-grained audio control, and a static-dynamic training-inference paradigm that avoids explicit motion supervision. Through these techniques, RAP achieves precise audio-driven control, mitigates long-term temporal drift, and maintains high visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAP achieves state-of-the-art performance while operating under real-time constraints.