mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

FlowPortrait: Reinforcement Learning for Audio-Driven Portrait Video Generation

arXiv 2603.00159 ↗First posted 25 Feb 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.MMcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

Generating realistic talking-head videos remains challenging due to persistent issues such as imperfect lip synchronization, unnatural motion, and evaluation metrics that correlate poorly with human perception. We propose FlowPortrait, a reinforcement-learning framework for audio-driven portrait animation built on a multimodal backbone for autoregressive audio-to-video generation. FlowPortrait introduces a human-aligned evaluation system based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to assess lip-sync accuracy, expressiveness, and motion quality. These signals are combined with perceptual and temporal consistency regularizers to form a stable composite reward, which is used to post-train the generator via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments, including both automatic evaluations and human preference studies, demonstrate that FlowPortrait consistently produces higher-quality talking-head videos, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforcement learning for portrait animation.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 24 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2026.

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24 of 32 references.

References · 24

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
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  12. 2017The Perception-Distortion Tradeoffcited by 582
12 more
  1. 2024Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 249
  2. 2024EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditionscited by 196
  3. 2025MixGRPO: Unlocking Flow-based GRPO Efficiency with Mixed ODE-SDEcited by 168
  4. 2024Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Modelscited by 151
  5. 2020Interacting particle solutions of Fokker-Planck equations through gradient-log-density estimationcited by 87
  6. 2022MetaPortrait: Identity-Preserving Talking Head Generation with Fast Personalized Adaptationcited by 69
  7. 2025Coefficients-Preserving Sampling for Reinforcement Learning with Flow Matchingcited by 55
  8. 2025GRPO-Guard: Mitigating Implicit Over-Optimization in Flow Matching via Regulated Clippingcited by 48
  9. 2023High-Fidelity and Freely Controllable Talking Head Video Generationcited by 42
  10. 2023A Light Weight Model for Active Speaker Detectioncited by 39
  11. 2024MEMO: Memory-Guided Diffusion for Expressive Talking Video Generationcited by 38
  12. 2025Kling-Avatar: Grounding Multimodal Instructions for Cascaded Long-Duration Avatar Animation Synthesiscited by 20

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2025FantasyTalking2: Timestep-Layer Adaptive Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation
  2. 2026ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance
  3. 2024Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation
  4. 2024FLOAT: Generative Motion Latent Flow Matching for Audio-driven Talking Portrait
  5. 2025Hallo4: High-Fidelity Dynamic Portrait Animation via Direct Preference Optimization
  6. 2025Seedance 1.5 pro: A Native Audio-Visual Joint Generation Foundation Model
  7. 2025X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio
  8. 2025DEMO: Disentangled Motion Latent Flow Matching for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Portrait Synthesis