# EmbedTalk: Talking Head Synthesis using Gaussian Embeddings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07604 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07604/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08136/) (2024)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13430/) (2023)
- [Per-Gaussian Embedding-Based Deformation for Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03613/) (2024)
- [SyncTalk: The Devil is in the Synchronization for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17590/) (2023)
- [Real-time Neural Radiance Talking Portrait Synthesis via Audio-spatial Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12368/) (2022)
- [EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01647/) (2024)
- [Efficient Region-Aware Neural Radiance Fields for High-Fidelity Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09323/) (2023)
- [EchoMimicV2: Towards Striking, Simplified, and Semi-Body Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10061/) (2024)
- [Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16331/) (2024)
- [AniTalker: Animate Vivid and Diverse Talking Faces through Identity-Decoupled Facial Motion Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03121/) (2024)
- [TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15264/) (2024)
- [Fr'echet Video Motion Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Motion Consistency in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16124/) (2024)
- [FreeTimeGS: Free Gaussian Primitives at Anytime and Anywhere for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05348/) (2025)
- [FLOAT: Generative Motion Latent Flow Matching for Audio-driven Talking Portrait](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01064/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a popular method for real-time talking head synthesis, offering high-quality renderings at low latency. Tri-planes are a common choice for encoding Gaussians prior to deformation since they provide a compact and continuous representation. However, tri-plane encodings are limited by grid resolution and approximation errors introduced by projecting 3D volumetric fields onto 2D subspaces. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of per-Gaussian embeddings for driving temporal deformations in 4D scene reconstruction. We introduce EmbedTalk, which leverages these embeddings to model speech-driven facial deformations for talking head synthesis. Comprehensive experiments show that EmbedTalk improves rendering quality, lip synchronisation, and motion consistency over previous 3DGS-based methods, while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art generative models. Replacing tri-plane features with embeddings also yields significantly more compact models that achieve 60+ FPS on a laptop GPU (RTX 2060 6 GB). Our code will be placed in the public domain on acceptance.