Cafe-Talk: Generating 3D Talking Face Animation with Multimodal Coarse- and Fine-grained Control

Hejia Chen, Haoxian Zhang, Shoulong Zhang, Xiaoqiang Liu, Sisi Zhuang, zhangyuan, Pengfei Wan, Di ZHANG, Shuai Li

Keywords: 3D talking face, generative model, fine-grained control, action units

TL;DR: Our model flexibly generates fine-grained 3D talking face animations, such as introducing a sudden smile or blink in a multimodal manner within an angry animation.

Abstract: Speech-driven 3D talking face method should offer both accurate lip synchronization and controllable expressions. Previous methods solely adopt discrete emotion labels to globally control expressions throughout sequences while limiting flexible fine-grained facial control within the spatiotemporal domain. We propose a diffusion-transformer-based 3D talking face generation model, Cafe-Talk, which simultaneously incorporates coarse- and fine-grained multimodal control conditions. Nevertheless, the entanglement of multiple conditions challenges achieving satisfying performance. To disentangle speech audio and fine-grained conditions, we employ a two-stage training pipeline. Specifically, Cafe-Talk is initially trained using only speech audio and coarse-grained conditions. Then, a proposed fine-grained control adapter gradually adds fine-grained instructions represented by action units (AUs), preventing unfavorable speech-lip synchronization. To disentangle coarse- and fine-grained conditions, we design a swap-label training mechanism, which enables the dominance of the fine-grained conditions. We also devise a mask-based CFG technique to regulate the occurrence and intensity of fine-grained control. In addition, a text-based detector is introduced with text-AU alignment to enable natural language user input and further support multimodal control. Extensive experimental results prove that Cafe-Talk achieves state-of-the-art lip synchronization and expressiveness performance and receives wide acceptance in fine-grained control in user studies.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

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Submission Number: 2818