# FreeTalk: Emotional Topology-Free 3D Talking Heads

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15512 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15512/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Generating 3D faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10267/) (2018)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02379/) (2023)
- [DiffusionNet: Discretization Agnostic Learning on Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00888/) (2020)
- [EmoTalk: Speech-Driven Emotional Disentanglement for 3D Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11089/) (2023)
- [Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08990/) (2023)
- [Multiface: A Dataset for Neural Face Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11243/) (2022)
- [DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00434/) (2023)
- [FaceDiffuser: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11306/) (2023)
- [Imitator: Personalized Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00023/) (2022)
- [SelfTalk: A Self-Supervised Commutative Training Diagram to Comprehend 3D Talking Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10799/) (2023)
- [3D Face Modeling From Diverse Raw Scan Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04943/) (2019)
- [Neural Face Rigging for Animating and Retargeting Facial Meshes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08296/) (2023)
- [ScanTalk: 3D Talking Heads from Unregistered Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10942/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Facial Asset and Rig Generation from a Single Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00560/) (2020)
- [Sparse to Dense Dynamic 3D Facial Expression Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07463/) (2021)
- [Shape My Face: Registering 3D Face Scans by Surface-to-Surface Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09235/) (2020)
- [KMTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Key Motion Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01113/) (2024)
- [EmoVOCA: Speech-Driven Emotional 3D Talking Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12886/) (2024)
- [DEEPTalk: Dynamic Emotion Embedding for Probabilistic Speech-Driven 3D Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06010/) (2024)
- [A Sparse and Locally Coherent Morphable Face Model for Dense Semantic Correspondence Across Heterogeneous 3D Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03840/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has advanced rapidly, yet most approaches remain tied to registered template meshes, preventing effective deployment on raw 3D scans with arbitrary topology. At the same time, modeling controllable emotional dynamics beyond lip articulation remains challenging, and is often tied to template-based parameterizations. We address these challenges by proposing FreeTalk, a two-stage framework for emotion-conditioned 3D talking-head animation that generalizes to unregistered face meshes with arbitrary vertex count and connectivity. First, Audio-To-Sparse (ATS) predicts a temporally coherent sequence of 3D landmark displacements from speech audio, conditioned on an emotion category and intensity. This sparse representation captures both articulatory and affective motion while remaining independent of mesh topology. Second, Sparse-To-Mesh (STM) transfers the predicted landmark motion to a target mesh by combining intrinsic surface features with landmark-to-vertex conditioning, producing dense per-vertex deformations without template fitting or correspondence supervision at test time. Extensive experiments show that FreeTalk matches specialized baselines when trained in-domain, while providing substantially improved robustness to unseen identities and mesh topologies. Code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.