# Warm Chat: Diffuse Emotion-aware Interactive Talking Head Avatar with Tree-Structured Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18337/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

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

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (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)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08136/) (2024)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11161/) (2024)
- [Seeing What You Said: Talking Face Generation Guided by a Lip Reading Expert](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17480/) (2023)
- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [Efficient Emotional Adaptation for Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04946/) (2023)
- [Responsive Listening Head Generation: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13548/) (2021)
- [AniTalker: Animate Vivid and Diverse Talking Faces through Identity-Decoupled Facial Motion Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03121/) (2024)
- [Let Them Talk: Audio-Driven Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22647/) (2025)
- [GeneFace++: Generalized and Stable Real-Time Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00787/) (2023)
- [Can Language Models Learn to Listen?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10897/) (2023)
- [Affective Faces for Goal-Driven Dyadic Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10939/) (2023)
- [Dyadic Interaction Modeling for Social Behavior Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09069/) (2024)
- [DualTalk: Dual-Speaker Interaction for 3D Talking Head Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18096/) (2025)
- [CustomListener: Text-guided Responsive Interaction for User-friendly Listening Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00274/) (2024)
- [MFR-Net: Multi-faceted Responsive Listening Head Generation via Denoising Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16635/) (2023)
- [REACT 2024: the Second Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05166/) (2024)
- [Teller: Real-Time Streaming Audio-Driven Portrait Animation with Autoregressive Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18429/) (2025)
- [Perceptual Conversational Head Generation with Regularized Driver and Enhanced Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12837/) (2022)
- [DiTaiListener: Controllable High Fidelity Listener Video Generation with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04010/) (2025)
- [DiffListener: Discrete Diffusion Model for Listener Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06822/) (2025)
- [Efficient Listener: Dyadic Facial Motion Synthesis via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20685/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative models have advanced rapidly, enabling impressive talking head generation that brings AI to life. However, most existing methods focus solely on one-way portrait animation. Even the few that support bidirectional conversational interactions lack precise emotion-adaptive capabilities, significantly limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose Warm Chat, a novel emotion-aware talking head generation framework for dyadic interactions. Leveraging the dialogue generation capability of large language models (LLMs, e.g., GPT-4), our method produces temporally consistent virtual avatars with rich emotional variations that seamlessly transition between speaking and listening states. Specifically, we design a Transformer-based head mask generator that learns temporally consistent motion features in a latent mask space, capable of generating arbitrary-length, temporally consistent mask sequences to constrain head motions. Furthermore, we introduce an interactive talking tree structure to represent dialogue state transitions, where each tree node contains information such as child/parent/sibling nodes and the current character's emotional state. By performing reverse-level traversal, we extract rich historical emotional cues from the current node to guide expression synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and effectiveness of our method.