# EmoTaG: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Synthesis on Gaussian Splatting with Few-Shot Personalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21332 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21332/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08801/) (2024)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08136/) (2024)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13430/) (2023)
- [Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08990/) (2023)
- [Real3D-Portrait: One-shot Realistic 3D Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08503/) (2024)
- [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)
- [TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15264/) (2024)
- [Face Relighting with Geometrically Consistent Shadows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16681/) (2022)
- [Towards High Fidelity Face Relighting with Realistic Shadows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00825/) (2021)
- [GeneFace++: Generalized and Stable Real-Time Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00787/) (2023)
- [FlowVQTalker: High-Quality Emotional Talking Face Generation through Normalizing Flow and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06375/) (2024)
- [Style2Talker: High-Resolution Talking Head Generation with Emotion Style and Art Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06365/) (2024)
- [FATE: Full-head Gaussian Avatar with Textural Editing from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15604/) (2024)
- [RGBAvatar: Reduced Gaussian Blendshapes for Online Modeling of Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12886/) (2025)
- [TAMM: TriAdapter Multi-Modal Learning for 3D Shape Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18490/) (2024)
- [Say Anything with Any Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06363/) (2024)
- [InsTaG: Learning Personalized 3D Talking Head from Few-Second Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20387/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GaussianEmoTalker: Real-Time Emotional Talking Head Synthesis with Audio-Driven and Blendshape-Based 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00959/) (2026)
- [Subtoken Vision Transformer for Fine-grained Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09086/) (2026)
- [Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching: Real-Time One-Shot Emotion-Controllable Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01978/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-driven 3D talking head synthesis has advanced rapidly with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). By leveraging rich pre-trained priors, few-shot methods enable instant personalization from just a few seconds of video. However, under expressive facial motion, existing few-shot approaches often suffer from geometric instability and audio-emotion mismatch, highlighting the need for more effective emotion-aware motion modeling. In this work, we present EmoTaG, a few-shot emotion-aware 3D talking head synthesis framework built on the Pretrain-and-Adapt paradigm. Our key insight is to reformulate motion prediction in a structured FLAME parameter space rather than directly deforming 3D Gaussians, thereby introducing explicit geometric priors that improve motion stability. Building upon this, we propose a Gated Residual Motion Network (GRMN), which captures emotional prosody from audio while supplementing head pose and upper-face cues absent from audio, enabling expressive and coherent motion generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoTaG achieves state-of-the-art performance in emotional expressiveness, lip synchronization, visual realism, and motion stability.