# PortraitDirector: A Hierarchical Disentanglement Framework for Controllable and Real-time Facial Reenactment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [StyleRig: Rigging StyleGAN for 3D Control over Portrait Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00121/) (2020)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05566/) (2019)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (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)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (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)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [Lip Movements Generation at a Glance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10404/) (2018)
- [EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15278/) (2022)
- [MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07621/) (2022)
- [Realistic One-shot Mesh-based Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08343/) (2022)
- [MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12052/) (2023)
- [FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14057/) (2022)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)
- [X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15931/) (2024)
- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [Animate-X: Universal Character Image Animation with Enhanced Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10306/) (2024)
- [Talking Face Generation by Conditional Recurrent Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04786/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PixReenact: Pixel-Conditioned Causal Video Diffusion for Streaming Head-Avatar Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05233/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing facial reenactment methods struggle with a trade-off between expressiveness and fine-grained controllability. Holistic facial reenactment models often sacrifice granular control for expressiveness, while methods designed for control may struggle with fidelity and robust disentanglement. Instead of treating facial motion as a monolithic signal, we explore an alternative compositional perspective. In this paper, we introduce PortraitDirector, a novel framework that formulates face reenactment as a hierarchical composition task, achieving high-fidelity and controllable results. We employ a Hierarchical Motion Disentanglement and Composition strategy, deconstructing facial motion into a Spatial Layer for physical movements and a Semantic Layer for emotional content. The Spatial Layer comprises: (i) global head pose, managed via a dedicated representation and injection pathway; (ii) spatially separated local facial expressions, distilled from cropped facial regions and purged of emotional cues via Emotion-Filtering Module leveraging an information bottleneck. The Semantic Layer contains a derived global emotion. The disentangled components are then recomposed into an expressive motion latent. Furthermore, we engineer the framework for real-time performance through a suite of optimizations, including diffusion distillation, causal attention and VAE acceleration. PortraitDirector achieves streaming, high-fidelity, controllable 512 x 512 face reenactment at 20 FPS with a end-to-end 800 ms latency on a single 5090 GPU.