Huaize Liu

Huaize Liu, Wenzhang Sun, Donglin Di et al.

The generation of talking avatars has achieved significant advancements in precise audio synchronization. However, crafting lifelike talking head videos requires capturing a broad spectrum of emotions and subtle facial expressions. Current methods face fundamental challenges: a) the absence of frameworks for modeling single basic emotional expressions, which restricts the generation of complex emotions such as compound emotions; b) the lack of comprehensive datasets rich in human emotional expressions, which limits the potential of models. To address these challenges, we propose the following innovations: 1) the Mixture of Emotion Experts (MoEE) model, which decouples six fundamental emotions to enable the precise synthesis of both singular and compound emotional states; 2) the DH-FaceEmoVid-150 dataset, specifically curated to include six prevalent human emotional expressions as well as four types of compound emotions, thereby expanding the training potential of emotion-driven models. Furthermore, to enhance the flexibility of emotion control, we propose an emotion-to-latents module that leverages multimodal inputs, aligning diverse control signals-such as audio, text, and labels-to ensure more varied control inputs as well as the ability to control emotions using audio alone. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that the MoEE framework, in conjunction with the DH-FaceEmoVid-150 dataset, excels in generating complex emotional expressions and nuanced facial details, setting a new benchmark in the field. These datasets will be publicly released.

Qiyuan Zhang, Chenyu Wu, Wenzhang Sun et al.

Recent advancements in portrait video generation have been noteworthy. However, existing methods rely heavily on human priors and pre-trained generative models, Motion representations based on human priors may introduce unrealistic motion, while methods relying on pre-trained generative models often suffer from inefficient inference. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic Latent Motion (SeMo), a compact and expressive motion representation. Leveraging this representation, our approach achieve both high-quality visual results and efficient inference. SeMo follows an effective three-step framework: Abstraction, Reasoning, and Generation. First, in the Abstraction step, we use a carefully designed Masked Motion Encoder, which leverages a self-supervised learning paradigm to compress the subject's motion state into a compact and abstract latent motion (1D token). Second, in the Reasoning step, we efficiently generate motion sequences based on the driving audio signal. Finally, in the Generation step, the motion dynamics serve as conditional information to guide the motion decoder in synthesizing realistic transitions from reference frame to target video. Thanks to the compact and expressive nature of Semantic Latent Motion, our method achieves efficient motion representation and high-quality video generation. User studies demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art models with an 81% win rate in realism. Extensive experiments further highlight its strong compression capability, reconstruction quality, and generative potential.

Huaize Liu, Wenzhang Sun, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Recent breakthroughs in video autoencoders (Video AEs) have advanced video generation, but existing methods fail to efficiently model spatio-temporal redundancies in dynamics, resulting in suboptimal compression factors. This shortfall leads to excessive training costs for downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce Hi-VAE, an efficient video autoencoding framework that hierarchically encode coarse-to-fine motion representations of video dynamics and formulate the decoding process as a conditional generation task. Specifically, Hi-VAE decomposes video dynamics into two latent spaces: Global Motion, capturing overarching motion patterns, and Detailed Motion, encoding high-frequency spatial details. Using separate self-supervised motion encoders, we compress video latents into compact motion representations to reduce redundancy significantly. A conditional diffusion decoder then reconstructs videos by combining hierarchical global and detailed motions, enabling high-fidelity video reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-VAE achieves a high compression factor of 1428$\times$, almost 30$\times$ higher than baseline methods (e.g., Cosmos-VAE at 48$\times$), validating the efficiency of our approach. Meanwhile, Hi-VAE maintains high reconstruction quality at such high compression rates and performs effectively in downstream generative tasks. Moreover, Hi-VAE exhibits interpretability and scalability, providing new perspectives for future exploration in video latent representation and generation.