Ming Lu

Peng Chen, Xiaobao Wei, Ming Lu et al.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been an attractive task in both academia and industry. Traditional methods mostly focus on learning a deterministic mapping from speech to animation. Recent approaches start to consider the non-deterministic fact of speech-driven 3D face animation and employ the diffusion model for the task. However, personalizing facial animation and accelerating animation generation are still two major limitations of existing diffusion-based methods. To address the above limitations, we propose DiffusionTalker, a diffusion-based method that utilizes contrastive learning to personalize 3D facial animation and knowledge distillation to accelerate 3D animation generation. Specifically, to enable personalization, we introduce a learnable talking identity to aggregate knowledge in audio sequences. The proposed identity embeddings extract customized facial cues across different people in a contrastive learning manner. During inference, users can obtain personalized facial animation based on input audio, reflecting a specific talking style. With a trained diffusion model with hundreds of steps, we distill it into a lightweight model with 8 steps for acceleration. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released.

Maojiang Su, Po-Chung Hsieh, Weimin Wu et al.

We introduce Discrete flow Matching policy Optimization (DoMinO), a unified framework for Reinforcement Learning (RL) fine-tuning Discrete Flow Matching (DFM) models under a broad class of policy gradient methods. Our key idea is to view the DFM sampling procedure as a multi-step Markov Decision Process. This perspective provides a simple and transparent reformulation of fine-tuning reward maximization as a robust RL objective. Consequently, it not only preserves the original DFM samplers but also avoids biased auxiliary estimators and likelihood surrogates used by many prior RL fine-tuning methods. To prevent policy collapse, we also introduce new total-variation regularizers to keep the fine-tuned distribution close to the pretrained one. Theoretically, we establish an upper bound on the discretization error of DoMinO and tractable upper bounds for the regularizers. Experimentally, we evaluate DoMinO on regulatory DNA sequence design. DoMinO achieves stronger predicted enhancer activity and better sequence naturalness than the previous best reward-driven baselines. The regularization further improves alignment with the natural sequence distribution while preserving strong functional performance. These results establish DoMinO as an useful framework for controllable discrete sequence generation.