# ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19900 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19900/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 48 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03277/) (2020)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10973/) (2023)
- [Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08861/) (2018)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08136/) (2024)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [Towards Metrical Reconstruction of Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06607/) (2022)
- [ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06070/) (2024)
- [FlashAvatar: High-fidelity Head Avatar with Efficient Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02214/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While diffusion models have shown great potential in portrait generation, generating expressive, coherent, and controllable cinematic portrait videos remains a significant challenge. Existing intermediate signals for portrait generation, such as 2D landmarks and parametric models, have limited disentanglement capabilities and cannot express personalized details due to their sparse or low-rank representation. Therefore, existing methods based on these models struggle to accurately preserve subject identity and expressions, hindering the generation of highly expressive portrait videos. To overcome these limitations, we propose a high-fidelity personalized head representation that more effectively disentangles expression and identity. This representation captures both static, subject-specific global geometry and dynamic, expression-related details. Furthermore, we introduce an expression transfer module to achieve personalized transfer of head pose and expression details between different identities. We use this sophisticated and highly expressive head model as a conditional signal to train a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based generator to synthesize richly detailed portrait videos. Extensive experiments on self- and cross-reenactment tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms previous models in terms of identity preservation, expression accuracy, and temporal stability, particularly in capturing fine-grained details of complex motion.