# VividFace: Real-Time and Realistic Facial Expression Shadowing for Humanoid Robots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07506/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [MetaAlign: Coordinating Domain Alignment and Classification for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13575/) (2021)
- [Smile Like You Mean It: Driving Animatronic Robotic Face with Learned Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12724/) (2021)
- [Humanoid Robots and Humanoid AI: Review, Perspectives and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15775/) (2024)
- [UGotMe: An Embodied System for Affective Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18373/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humanoid facial expression shadowing enables robots to realistically imitate human facial expressions in real time, which is critical for lifelike, facially expressive humanoid robots and affective human-robot interaction. Existing progress in humanoid facial expression imitation remains limited, often failing to achieve either real-time performance or realistic expressiveness due to offline video-based inference designs and insufficient ability to capture and transfer subtle expression details. To address these limitations, we present VividFace, a real-time and realistic facial expression shadowing system for humanoid robots. An optimized imitation framework X2CNet++ enhances expressiveness by fine-tuning the human-to-humanoid facial motion transfer module and introducing a feature-adaptation training strategy for better alignment across different image sources. Real-time shadowing is further enabled by a video-stream-compatible inference pipeline and a streamlined workflow based on asynchronous I/O for efficient communication across devices. VividFace produces vivid humanoid faces by mimicking human facial expressions within 0.05 seconds, while generalizing across diverse facial configurations. Extensive real-world demonstrations validate its practical utility. Videos are available at: https://lipzh5.github.io/VividFace/.