# ConsistTalk: Intensity Controllable Temporally Consistent Talking Head Generation with Diffusion Noise Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06833 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06833/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

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

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00131/) (2024)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [Bailando: 3D Dance Generation by Actor-Critic GPT with Choreographic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13055/) (2022)
- [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)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [Searching for Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05941/) (2017)
- [ConsistI2V: Enhancing Visual Consistency for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04324/) (2024)
- [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)
- [FantasyTalking: Realistic Talking Portrait Generation via Coherent Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04842/) (2025)
- [Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16331/) (2024)
- [Shape and Time Distortion Loss for Training Deep Time Series Forecasting Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09020/) (2019)
- [AniTalker: Animate Vivid and Diverse Talking Faces through Identity-Decoupled Facial Motion Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03121/) (2024)
- [FacialFlowNet: Advancing Facial Optical Flow Estimation with a Diverse Dataset and a Decomposed Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05396/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SyncBreaker:Stage-Aware Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08405/) (2026)
- [MIRRORTALK: Forging Personalized Avatars Via Disentangled Style and Hierarchical Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22501/) (2026)
- [Keyframe-Anchored Identity Preservation for Sequential-Action Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17985/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in video diffusion models have significantly enhanced audio-driven portrait animation. However, current methods still suffer from flickering, identity drift, and poor audio-visual synchronization. These issues primarily stem from entangled appearance-motion representations and unstable inference strategies. In this paper, we introduce ConsistTalk, a novel intensity-controllable and temporally consistent talking head generation framework with diffusion noise search inference. First, we propose an optical flow-guided temporal module (OFT) that decouples motion features from static appearance by leveraging facial optical flow, thereby reducing visual flicker and improving temporal consistency. Second, we present an Audio-to-Intensity (A2I) model obtained through multimodal teacher-student knowledge distillation. By transforming audio and facial velocity features into a frame-wise intensity sequence, the A2I model enables joint modeling of audio and visual motion, resulting in more natural dynamics. This further enables fine-grained, frame-wise control of motion dynamics while maintaining tight audio-visual synchronization. Third, we introduce a diffusion noise initialization strategy (IC-Init). By enforcing explicit constraints on background coherence and motion continuity during inference-time noise search, we achieve better identity preservation and refine motion dynamics compared to the current autoregressive strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistTalk significantly outperforms prior methods in reducing flicker, preserving identity, and delivering temporally stable, high-fidelity talking head videos.
