# Talking Head Generation via AU-Guided Landmark Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19749 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19749/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03820/) (2019)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08801/) (2024)
- [AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17694/) (2024)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [Audio2Head: Audio-driven One-shot Talking-head Generation with Natural Head Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09293/) (2021)
- [Diffused Heads: Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Talking-Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03396/) (2023)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13430/) (2023)
- [Learning Dynamic Facial Radiance Fields for Few-Shot Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11770/) (2022)
- [Hallo2: Long-Duration and High-Resolution Audio-Driven Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07718/) (2024)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)
- [StyleTalk: One-shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01081/) (2023)
- [Efficient Emotional Adaptation for Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04946/) (2023)
- [EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01647/) (2024)
- [AniTalker: Animate Vivid and Diverse Talking Faces through Identity-Decoupled Facial Motion Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03121/) (2024)
- [Frame attention networks for facial expression recognition in videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00193/) (2019)
- [Speech Driven Talking Face Generation from a Single Image and an Emotion Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03592/) (2020)
- [PortaSpeech: Portable and High-Quality Generative Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15166/) (2021)
- [Emotion-Controllable Generalized Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01155/) (2022)
- [FlowVQTalker: High-Quality Emotional Talking Face Generation through Normalizing Flow and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06375/) (2024)
- [MEMO: Memory-Guided Diffusion for Expressive Talking Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04448/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15524/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a two-stage framework for audio-driven talking head generation with fine-grained expression control via facial Action Units (AUs). Unlike prior methods relying on emotion labels or implicit AU conditioning, our model explicitly maps AUs to 2D facial landmarks, enabling physically grounded, per-frame expression control. In the first stage, a variational motion generator predicts temporally coherent landmark sequences from audio and AU intensities. In the second stage, a diffusion-based synthesizer generates realistic, lip-synced videos conditioned on these landmarks and a reference image. This separation of motion and appearance improves expression accuracy, temporal stability, and visual realism. Experiments on the MEAD dataset show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicit AU-to-landmark modeling for expressive talking head generation.