# Uncertainty-Aware 3D Emotional Talking Face Synthesis with Emotion Prior Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19112 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19112/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (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)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)
- [EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01647/) (2024)
- [TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15264/) (2024)
- [StableAvatar: Infinite-Length Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08248/) (2025)
- [FlowVQTalker: High-Quality Emotional Talking Face Generation through Normalizing Flow and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06375/) (2024)
- [Speech Emotion Recognition with Co-Attention based Multi-level Acoustic Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15326/) (2022)
- [EmotiveTalk: Expressive Talking Head Generation through Audio Information Decoupling and Emotional Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16726/) (2024)
- [DEGSTalk: Decomposed Per-Embedding Gaussian Fields for Hair-Preserving Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20148/) (2024)
- [NeRF-3DTalker: Neural Radiance Field with 3D Prior Aided Audio Disentanglement for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14178/) (2025)
- [Audio-Plane: Audio Factorization Plane Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22605/) (2025)
- [Audio-Driven Talking Face Video Generation with Joint Uncertainty Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18810/) (2025)
- [Emotion Recognition and Generation: A Comprehensive Review of Face, Speech, and Text Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06803/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional Talking Face synthesis is pivotal in multimedia and signal processing, yet existing 3D methods suffer from two critical challenges: poor audio-vision emotion alignment, manifested as difficult audio emotion extraction and inadequate control over emotional micro-expressions; and a one-size-fits-all multi-view fusion strategy that overlooks uncertainty and feature quality differences, undermining rendering quality. We propose UA-3DTalk, Uncertainty-Aware 3D Emotional Talking Face Synthesis with emotion prior distillation, which has three core modules: the Prior Extraction module disentangles audio into content-synchronized features for alignment and person-specific complementary features for individualization; the Emotion Distillation module introduces a multi-modal attention-weighted fusion mechanism and 4D Gaussian encoding with multi-resolution code-books, enabling fine-grained audio emotion extraction and precise control of emotional micro-expressions; the Uncertainty-based Deformation deploys uncertainty blocks to estimate view-specific aleatoric (input noise) and epistemic (model parameters) uncertainty, realizing adaptive multi-view fusion and incorporating a multi-head decoder for Gaussian primitive optimization to mitigate the limitations of uniform-weight fusion. Extensive experiments on regular and emotional datasets show UA-3DTalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods like DEGSTalk and EDTalk by 5.2% in E-FID for emotion alignment, 3.1% in SyncC for lip synchronization, and 0.015 in LPIPS for rendering quality. Project page: https://mrask999.github.io/UA-3DTalk