Beyond Boundary Frames: Talking-Head Inbetweening via Context-Aware Motion Modeling

Existing talking-head generation methods primarily target open-ended generation rather than bridging two existing video segments. In this paper, we study talking-head inbetweening, a practical editing task that aims to generate realistic intermediate frames under fixed endpoint constraints. Unlike generic video inbetweening, this task requires recovering subtle speech-driven facial dynamics over long temporal gaps, where the boundary frames alone provide insufficient guidance for realistic motion recovery. To address this problem, we propose BBF (Beyond Boundary Frames), a unified context-aware framework for talking-head inbetweening. BBF consists of three complementary components: Endpoint Anchoring for preserving endpoint consistency, Motion Evolution Modeling for capturing plausible temporal transitions from surrounding visual context, and Speech Dynamics Refinement for injecting fine-grained speech-driven facial dynamics from speech audio. A progressive optimization strategy further balances structural consistency and motion refinement during denoising. Extensive experiments on the talking-head benchmarks HDTF and Hallo3 demonstrate that BBF consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, BBF surpasses the strongest baseline on Hallo3 by 23.3% in FID and 36.5% in FVD. Moreover, BBF demonstrates strong generalization on generic video inbetweening benchmarks.