# IMTalker: Efficient Audio-driven Talking Face Generation with Implicit Motion Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [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)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09043/) (2022)
- [Hallo3: Highly Dynamic and Realistic Portrait Image Animation with Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00733/) (2024)
- [CelebV-Text: A Large-Scale Facial Text-Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14717/) (2023)
- [Hallo2: Long-Duration and High-Resolution Audio-Driven Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07718/) (2024)
- [X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15931/) (2024)
- [SMIRK: 3D Facial Expressions through Analysis-by-Neural-Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04104/) (2024)

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

- [Decoupled Self-Forcing Distillation for Streaming Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10317/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Talking face generation aims to synthesize realistic speaking portraits from a single image, yet existing methods often rely on explicit optical flow and local warping, which fail to model complex global motions and cause identity drift. We present IMTalker, a novel framework that achieves efficient and high-fidelity talking face generation through implicit motion transfer. The core idea is to replace traditional flow-based warping with a cross-attention mechanism that implicitly models motion discrepancy and identity alignment within a unified latent space, enabling robust global motion rendering. To further preserve speaker identity during cross-identity reenactment, we introduce an identity-adaptive module that projects motion latents into personalized spaces, ensuring clear disentanglement between motion and identity. In addition, a lightweight flow-matching motion generator produces vivid and controllable implicit motion vectors from audio, pose, and gaze cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMTalker surpasses prior methods in motion accuracy, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization, achieving state-of-the-art quality with superior efficiency, operating at 40 FPS for video-driven and 42 FPS for audio-driven generation on an RTX 4090 GPU. We will release our code and pre-trained models to facilitate applications and future research.