Xiaoyan Wu

Yuzhe Weng, Haotian Wang, Xinyi Yu et al.

Audio-driven human video generation has achieved remarkable success in monologue scenarios, largely driven by advancements in powerful video generation foundation models. Moving beyond monologues, authentic human communication is inherently a full-duplex interactive process, requiring virtual agents not only to articulate their own speech but also to react naturally to incoming conversational audio. Most existing methods simply extend conventional audio-driven paradigms to listening scenarios. However, relying on strict frame-to-frame alignment renders the model's response to long-range conversational dynamics rigid, whereas directly introducing global attention catastrophically degrades lip synchronization. Recognizing the unique temporal Scale Discrepancy between talking and listening behaviors, we introduce a multi-head Gaussian kernel to explicitly inject this physical intuition into the model as a progressive temporal inductive bias. Building upon this, we construct a full-duplex interactive virtual agent capable of simultaneously processing dual-stream audio inputs for both talking and listening. Furthermore, we introduce a rigorously cleaned Talking-Listening dataset VoxHear featuring perfectly decoupled speech and background audio tracks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully fuses strong temporal alignment with deep contextual semantics, setting a new state-of-the-art for generating highly natural and responsive full-duplex interactive digital humans. The project page is available at https://warmcongee.github.io/beyond-monologue/ .

Yuzhe Weng, Haotian Wang, Yuanhong Yu et al.

Audio-driven talking head generation aims to create vivid and realistic videos from a static portrait and speech. Existing AR-based methods rely on intermediate facial representations, which limit their expressiveness and realism. Meanwhile, diffusion-based methods generate clip-by-clip, lacking fine-grained control and causing inherent latency due to overall denoising across the window. To address these limitations, we propose EARTalking, a novel end-to-end, GPT-style autoregressive model for interactive audio-driven talking head generation. Our method introduces a novel frame-by-frame, in-context, audio-driven streaming generation paradigm. For inherently supporting variable-length video generation with identity consistency, we propose the Sink Frame Window Attention (SFA) mechanism. Furthermore, to avoid the complex, separate networks that prior works required for diverse control signals, we propose a streaming Frame Condition In-Context (FCIC) scheme. This scheme efficiently injects diverse control signals in a streaming, in-context manner, enabling interactive control at every frame and at arbitrary moments. Experiments demonstrate that EARTalking outperforms existing autoregressive methods and achieves performance comparable to diffusion-based methods. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of in-context streaming autoregressive control, unlocking a scalable direction for flexible, efficient generation. The code will be released for reproducibility.

Haotian Wang, Yuzhe Weng, Jun Du et al.

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the field of talking head generation (THG). However, slow inference speeds and prevalent non-autoregressive paradigms severely constrain the application of diffusion-based THG models. In this study, we propose REST, a pioneering diffusion-based, real-time, end-to-end streaming audio-driven talking head generation framework. To support real-time end-to-end generation, a compact video latent space is first learned through a spatiotemporal variational autoencoder with a high compression ratio. Additionally, to enable semi-autoregressive streaming within the compact video latent space, we introduce an ID-Context Cache mechanism, which integrates ID-Sink and Context-Cache principles into key-value caching for maintaining identity consistency and temporal coherence during long-term streaming generation. Furthermore, an Asynchronous Streaming Distillation (ASD) strategy is proposed to mitigate error accumulation and enhance temporal consistency in streaming generation, leveraging a non-streaming teacher with an asynchronous noise schedule to supervise the streaming student. REST bridges the gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based approaches, achieving a breakthrough in efficiency for applications requiring real-time THG. Experimental results demonstrate that REST outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generation speed and overall performance.

Haotian Wang, Yuzhe Weng, Yueyan Li et al.

Diffusion models have revolutionized the field of talking head generation, yet still face challenges in expressiveness, controllability, and stability in long-time generation. In this research, we propose an EmotiveTalk framework to address these issues. Firstly, to realize better control over the generation of lip movement and facial expression, a Vision-guided Audio Information Decoupling (V-AID) approach is designed to generate audio-based decoupled representations aligned with lip movements and expression. Specifically, to achieve alignment between audio and facial expression representation spaces, we present a Diffusion-based Co-speech Temporal Expansion (Di-CTE) module within V-AID to generate expression-related representations under multi-source emotion condition constraints. Then we propose a well-designed Emotional Talking Head Diffusion (ETHD) backbone to efficiently generate highly expressive talking head videos, which contains an Expression Decoupling Injection (EDI) module to automatically decouple the expressions from reference portraits while integrating the target expression information, achieving more expressive generation performance. Experimental results show that EmotiveTalk can generate expressive talking head videos, ensuring the promised controllability of emotions and stability during long-time generation, yielding state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.

Dapeng Zhang, Jing Sun, Chenghui Hu et al.

The emergence of Vision Language Action (VLA) models marks a paradigm shift from traditional policy-based control to generalized robotics, reframing Vision Language Models (VLMs) from passive sequence generators into active agents for manipulation and decision-making in complex, dynamic environments. This survey delves into advanced VLA methods, aiming to provide a clear taxonomy and a systematic, comprehensive review of existing research. It presents a comprehensive analysis of VLA applications across different scenarios and classifies VLA approaches into several paradigms: autoregression-based, diffusion-based, reinforcement-based, hybrid, and specialized methods; while examining their motivations, core strategies, and implementations in detail. In addition, foundational datasets, benchmarks, and simulation platforms are introduced. Building on the current VLA landscape, the review further proposes perspectives on key challenges and future directions to advance research in VLA models and generalizable robotics. By synthesizing insights from over three hundred recent studies, this survey maps the contours of this rapidly evolving field and highlights the opportunities and challenges that will shape the development of scalable, general-purpose VLA methods.

Haotian Wang, Yuzhe Weng, Jun Du et al.

The introduction of diffusion models has brought significant advances to the field of audio-driven talking head generation. However, the extremely slow inference speed severely limits the practical implementation of diffusion-based talking head generation models. In this study, we propose READ, a real-time diffusion-transformer-based talking head generation framework. Our approach first learns a spatiotemporal highly compressed video latent space via a temporal VAE, significantly reducing the token count to accelerate generation. To achieve better audio-visual alignment within this compressed latent space, a pre-trained Speech Autoencoder (SpeechAE) is proposed to generate temporally compressed speech latent codes corresponding to the video latent space. These latent representations are then modeled by a carefully designed Audio-to-Video Diffusion Transformer (A2V-DiT) backbone for efficient talking head synthesis. Furthermore, to ensure temporal consistency and accelerated inference in extended generation, we propose a novel asynchronous noise scheduler (ANS) for both the training and inference processes of our framework. The ANS leverages asynchronous add-noise and asynchronous motion-guided generation in the latent space, ensuring consistency in generated video clips. Experimental results demonstrate that READ outperforms state-of-the-art methods by generating competitive talking head videos with significantly reduced runtime, achieving an optimal balance between quality and speed while maintaining robust metric stability in long-time generation.

Haitao Gan, Lingchao Fu, Ran Zhou et al.

The classification of carotid artery ultrasound images is a crucial means for diagnosing carotid plaques, holding significant clinical relevance for predicting the risk of stroke. Recent research suggests that utilizing plaque segmentation as an auxiliary task for classification can enhance performance by leveraging the correlation between segmentation and classification tasks. However, this approach relies on obtaining a substantial amount of challenging-to-acquire segmentation annotations. This paper proposes a novel weakly supervised auxiliary task learning network model (WAL-Net) to explore the interdependence between carotid plaque classification and segmentation tasks. The plaque classification task is primary task, while the plaque segmentation task serves as an auxiliary task, providing valuable information to enhance the performance of the primary task. Weakly supervised learning is adopted in the auxiliary task to completely break away from the dependence on segmentation annotations. Experiments and evaluations are conducted on a dataset comprising 1270 carotid plaque ultrasound images from Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital. Results indicate that the proposed method achieved an approximately 1.3% improvement in carotid plaque classification accuracy compared to the baseline network. Specifically, the accuracy of mixed-echoic plaques classification increased by approximately 3.3%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Bo Peng, Hongxing Fan, Wei Wang et al.

This paper presents a summary of the DFGC 2021 competition. DeepFake technology is developing fast, and realistic face-swaps are increasingly deceiving and hard to detect. At the same time, DeepFake detection methods are also improving. There is a two-party game between DeepFake creators and detectors. This competition provides a common platform for benchmarking the adversarial game between current state-of-the-art DeepFake creation and detection methods. In this paper, we present the organization, results and top solutions of this competition and also share our insights obtained during this event. We also release the DFGC-21 testing dataset collected from our participants to further benefit the research community.