Liyang Chen

Team Seedance, De Chen, Liyang Chen et al. · gatech

Seedance 2.0 is a new native multi-modal audio-video generation model, officially released in China in early February 2026. Compared with its predecessors, Seedance 1.0 and 1.5 Pro, Seedance 2.0 adopts a unified, highly efficient, and large-scale architecture for multi-modal audio-video joint generation. This allows it to support four input modalities: text, image, audio, and video, by integrating one of the most comprehensive suites of multi-modal content reference and editing capabilities available in the industry to date. It delivers substantial, well-rounded improvements across all key sub-dimensions of video and audio generation. In both expert evaluations and public user tests, the model has demonstrated performance on par with the leading levels in the field. Seedance 2.0 supports direct generation of audio-video content with durations ranging from 4 to 15 seconds, with native output resolutions of 480p and 720p. For multi-modal inputs as reference, its current open platform supports up to 3 video clips, 9 images, and 3 audio clips. In addition, we provide Seedance 2.0 Fast version, an accelerated variant of Seedance 2.0 designed to boost generation speed for low-latency scenarios. Seedance 2.0 has delivered significant improvements to its foundational generation capabilities and multi-modal generation performance, bringing an enhanced creative experience for end users.

Sicheng Yang, Zhiyong Wu, Minglei Li et al.

This paper describes the ReprGesture entry to the Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents (GENEA) challenge 2022. The GENEA challenge provides the processed datasets and performs crowdsourced evaluations to compare the performance of different gesture generation systems. In this paper, we explore an automatic gesture generation system based on multimodal representation learning. We use WavLM features for audio, FastText features for text and position and rotation matrix features for gesture. Each modality is projected to two distinct subspaces: modality-invariant and modality-specific. To learn inter-modality-invariant commonalities and capture the characters of modality-specific representations, gradient reversal layer based adversarial classifier and modality reconstruction decoders are used during training. The gesture decoder generates proper gestures using all representations and features related to the rhythm in the audio. Our code, pre-trained models and demo are available at https://github.com/YoungSeng/ReprGesture.

Shun Lei, Yixuan Zhou, Liyang Chen et al.

Previous works on expressive speech synthesis mainly focus on current sentence. The context in adjacent sentences is neglected, resulting in inflexible speaking style for the same text, which lacks speech variations. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework to model speaking style from context. A hierarchical context encoder is proposed to explore a wider range of contextual information considering structural relationship in context, including inter-phrase and inter-sentence relations. Moreover, to encourage this encoder to learn style representation better, we introduce a novel training strategy with knowledge distillation, which provides the target for encoder training. Both objective and subjective evaluations on a Mandarin lecture dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech.

Jun Ling, Xu Tan, Liyang Chen et al.

While previous speech-driven talking face generation methods have made significant progress in improving the visual quality and lip-sync quality of the synthesized videos, they pay less attention to lip motion jitters which greatly undermine the realness of talking face videos. What causes motion jitters, and how to mitigate the problem? In this paper, we conduct systematic analyses on the motion jittering problem based on a state-of-the-art pipeline that uses 3D face representations to bridge the input audio and output video, and improve the motion stability with a series of effective designs. We find that several issues can lead to jitters in synthesized talking face video: 1) jitters from the input 3D face representations; 2) training-inference mismatch; 3) lack of dependency modeling among video frames. Accordingly, we propose three effective solutions to address this issue: 1) we propose a gaussian-based adaptive smoothing module to smooth the 3D face representations to eliminate jitters in the input; 2) we add augmented erosions on the input data of the neural renderer in training to simulate the distortion in inference to reduce mismatch; 3) we develop an audio-fused transformer generator to model dependency among video frames. Besides, considering there is no off-the-shelf metric for measuring motion jitters in talking face video, we devise an objective metric (Motion Stability Index, MSI), to quantitatively measure the motion jitters by calculating the reciprocal of variance acceleration. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our method on motion-stable face video generation, with better quality than previous systems.

Liyang Chen, Zhiyong Wu, Runnan Li et al.

Current talking face generation methods mainly focus on speech-lip synchronization. However, insufficient investigation on the facial talking style leads to a lifeless and monotonous avatar. Most previous works fail to imitate expressive styles from arbitrary video prompts and ensure the authenticity of the generated video. This paper proposes an unsupervised variational style transfer model (VAST) to vivify the neutral photo-realistic avatars. Our model consists of three key components: a style encoder that extracts facial style representations from the given video prompts; a hybrid facial expression decoder to model accurate speech-related movements; a variational style enhancer that enhances the style space to be highly expressive and meaningful. With our essential designs on facial style learning, our model is able to flexibly capture the expressive facial style from arbitrary video prompts and transfer it onto a personalized image renderer in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed approach contributes to a more vivid talking avatar with higher authenticity and richer expressiveness.

Xu He, Xiaoyu Li, Di Kang et al.

Existing works in single-image human reconstruction suffer from weak generalizability due to insufficient training data or 3D inconsistencies for a lack of comprehensive multi-view knowledge. In this paper, we introduce MagicMan, a human-specific multi-view diffusion model designed to generate high-quality novel view images from a single reference image. As its core, we leverage a pre-trained 2D diffusion model as the generative prior for generalizability, with the parametric SMPL-X model as the 3D body prior to promote 3D awareness. To tackle the critical challenge of maintaining consistency while achieving dense multi-view generation for improved 3D human reconstruction, we first introduce hybrid multi-view attention to facilitate both efficient and thorough information interchange across different views. Additionally, we present a geometry-aware dual branch to perform concurrent generation in both RGB and normal domains, further enhancing consistency via geometry cues. Last but not least, to address ill-shaped issues arising from inaccurate SMPL-X estimation that conflicts with the reference image, we propose a novel iterative refinement strategy, which progressively optimizes SMPL-X accuracy while enhancing the quality and consistency of the generated multi-views. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both novel view synthesis and subsequent 3D human reconstruction tasks.

Liyang Chen, Weihong Bao, Shun Lei et al.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims at generating facial movements that are synchronized with the driving speech, which has been widely explored recently. Existing works mostly neglect the person-specific talking style in generation, including facial expression and head pose styles. Several works intend to capture the personalities by fine-tuning modules. However, limited training data leads to the lack of vividness. In this work, we propose AdaMesh, a novel adaptive speech-driven facial animation approach, which learns the personalized talking style from a reference video of about 10 seconds and generates vivid facial expressions and head poses. Specifically, we propose mixture-of-low-rank adaptation (MoLoRA) to fine-tune the expression adapter, which efficiently captures the facial expression style. For the personalized pose style, we propose a pose adapter by building a discrete pose prior and retrieving the appropriate style embedding with a semantic-aware pose style matrix without fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, preserves the talking style in the reference video, and generates vivid facial animation. The supplementary video and code will be available at https://adamesh.github.io.

Xu He, Haoxian Zhang, Hejia Chen et al.

Audio-driven visual dubbing aims to synchronize a video's lip movements with new speech, but is fundamentally challenged by the lack of ideal training data: paired videos where only a subject's lip movements differ while all other visual conditions are identical. Existing methods circumvent this with a mask-based inpainting paradigm, where an incomplete visual conditioning forces models to simultaneously hallucinate missing content and sync lips, leading to visual artifacts, identity drift, and poor synchronization. In this work, we propose a novel self-bootstrapping framework that reframes visual dubbing from an ill-posed inpainting task into a well-conditioned video-to-video editing problem. Our approach employs a Diffusion Transformer, first as a data generator, to synthesize ideal training data: a lip-altered companion video for each real sample, forming visually aligned video pairs. A DiT-based audio-driven editor is then trained on these pairs end-to-end, leveraging the complete and aligned input video frames to focus solely on precise, audio-driven lip modifications. This complete, frame-aligned input conditioning forms a rich visual context for the editor, providing it with complete identity cues, scene interactions, and continuous spatiotemporal dynamics. Leveraging this rich context fundamentally enables our method to achieve highly accurate lip sync, faithful identity preservation, and exceptional robustness against challenging in-the-wild scenarios. We further introduce a timestep-adaptive multi-phase learning strategy as a necessary component to disentangle conflicting editing objectives across diffusion timesteps, thereby facilitating stable training and yielding enhanced lip synchronization and visual fidelity. Additionally, we propose ContextDubBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset for robust evaluation in diverse and challenging practical application scenarios.

Xu Guo, Fulong Ye, Qichao Sun et al.

Recent advancements in foundation models have revolutionized joint audio-video generation. However, existing approaches typically treat human-centric tasks including reference-based audio-video generation (R2AV), video editing (RV2AV) and audio-driven video animation (RA2V) as isolated objectives. Furthermore, achieving precise, disentangled control over multiple character identities and voice timbres within a single framework remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose DreamID-Omni, a unified framework for controllable human-centric audio-video generation. Specifically, we design a Symmetric Conditional Diffusion Transformer that integrates heterogeneous conditioning signals via a symmetric conditional injection scheme. To resolve the pervasive identity-timbre binding failures and speaker confusion in multi-person scenarios, we introduce a Dual-Level Disentanglement strategy: Synchronized RoPE at the signal level to ensure rigid attention-space binding, and Structured Captions at the semantic level to establish explicit attribute-subject mappings. Furthermore, we devise a Multi-Task Progressive Training scheme that leverages weakly-constrained generative priors to regularize strongly-constrained tasks, preventing overfitting and harmonizing disparate objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamID-Omni achieves comprehensive state-of-the-art performance across video, audio, and audio-visual consistency, even outperforming leading proprietary commercial models. We will release our code to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial-grade applications.

Sifan Li, Hongkai Chen, Yujun Cai et al.

Executable SQL generation is typically studied in text-to-SQL settings, where tables are provided as fully linearized textual schemas and contents. While effective, this formulation assumes access to structured text and incurs substantial token overhead, which is misaligned with many real-world scenarios where tables appear as visual artifacts in documents or webpages. We investigate whether compact optical representations can serve as an efficient interface for executable semantic parsing. We present OptiSQL, a vision-driven framework that generates executable SQL directly from table images and natural language questions using compact optical tokens. OptiSQL leverages an OCR-oriented visual encoder to compress table structure and content into a small set of optical tokens and fine-tunes a pretrained decoder for SQL generation while freezing the encoder to isolate representation sufficiency. Experiments on a visualized version of Spider 2.0-Snow show that OptiSQL retains strong execution accuracy while reducing table input tokens by an order of magnitude. Robustness analyses further demonstrate that optical tokens preserve essential structural information under visual perturbations.

Liyang Chen, Hongkai Chen, Yujun Cai et al.

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in audio understanding and reasoning. However, their performance on fine grained auditory perception remains unreliable, and existing approaches largely rely on data intensive training to internalize perceptual abilities. We propose AudioRouter, a reinforcement learning framework that enables LALMs to improve audio understanding by learning when and how to use external audio tools. Rather than tightly coupling tool usage with audio reasoning, AudioRouter formulates tool use as an explicit decision making problem and optimizes a lightweight routing policy while keeping the underlying reasoning model frozen. Experimental results show that AudioRouter achieves substantial improvements on standard audio understanding benchmarks while requiring up to 600x less training data to learn tool usage compared with conventional training paradigms. These findings suggest that learning effective tool usage offers a data efficient and scalable alternative to internalizing perceptual abilities in LALMs.

Shuhai Peng, Hui Lu, Jinjiang Liu et al.

While generative models have set new benchmarks for Target Speaker Extraction (TSE), their inherent reliance on global context precludes deployment in real-time applications. Direct adaptation to streaming scenarios often leads to catastrophic inference performance degradation due to the severe mismatch between training and streaming inference. To bridge this gap, we present the first autoregressive (AR) models tailored for streaming TSE. Our approach introduces a Chunk-wise Interleaved Splicing Paradigm that ensures highly efficient and stable streaming inference. To ensure the coherence between the extracted speech segments, we design a historical context refinement mechanism that mitigates boundary discontinuities by leveraging historical information. Experiments on Libri2Mix show that while AR generative baseline exhibits performance degradation at low latencies, our approach maintains 100% stability and superior intelligibility. Furthermore, our streaming results are comparable to or even surpass offline baselines. Additionally, our model achieves a Real-Time-Factor (RTF) of 0.248 on consumer-level GPUs. This work provides empirical evidence that AR generative backbones are viable for latency-sensitive applications through the Chunk-wise Interleaved Splicing Paradigm.

Liyang Chen, Yujun Cai, Jieqiong Dong et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems require corpora that are both structurally clean and semantically coherent. BRIGHT is a recent and influential benchmark designed to evaluate complex multi-hop retrieval across diverse, high-reasoning domains. However, its practical effectiveness is limited by common web-crawled artifacts - such as content redundancy and semantic discontinuity - that impair retrieval accuracy and downstream reasoning. Notably, we find that such issues are concentrated in seven StackExchange-derived subdomains, while other domains (e.g., Coding and Theorem-based content) remain relatively clean. In this study, we present MARCUS, a multi-agent pipeline that leverages large language models (LLMs) to systematically clean and re-chunk BRIGHT into a higher-quality corpus: BRIGHT-Plus. MARCUS applies dedicated agents for structural noise removal and semantic segmentation, preserving answer-bearing spans while improving contextual integrity. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that BRIGHT-Plus yields consistent and significant improvements in both retrieval accuracy and multi-hop reasoning across a diverse set of retrievers. We release both the BRIGHT-Plus corpus and the MARCUS pipeline to support future research on robust, reasoning-centric retrieval.

Liyang Chen, Tianxiang Ma, Jiawei Liu et al.

Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, image, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of training data with paired triplet conditions and the difficulty of collaborating the sub-tasks of subject preservation and audio-visual sync with multimodal inputs. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct a high-quality dataset with diverse and paired text, reference images, and audio. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies. For the subject preservation task, to maintain the prompt following and visual generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. For the audio-visual sync task, besides the commonly adopted audio cross-attention layer, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multimodal inputs, building on previously acquired capabilities, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a time-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG. Project Page: https://phantom-video.github.io/HuMo.

Sifan Li, Hongkai Chen, Yujun Cai et al.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in multimodal reasoning; yet, they remain vulnerable to hallucinations, where outputs are not grounded in visual evidence. In this paper, we investigate a previously overlooked setting: logo hallucination, where models generate brand names or textual content despite logos containing no visible words. Using curated splits of pure symbols, hybrids, and text-bearing logos, as well as the challenging Hard-60 subset, we systematically measure hallucination across leading VLMs. We further probe robustness through nine structured perturbations and show that hallucinations persist even under strong distortions, with occlusion exposing the sharpest weaknesses. Embedding-level analysis with open-weight LLaVA demonstrates that hallucination is tied to a small subset of projector dimensions, and targeted ablation substantially reduces errors while preserving OCR accuracy. Together, these findings reveal that VLMs often rely on symbolic priors rather than genuine glyph perception, particularly for iconic circular logos, and that projector subspaces play a decisive role in this failure mode. Our work contributes both a novel diagnostic lens and actionable mitigation insights, highlighting projector disentanglement and OCR-guided decoding as promising directions for building more trustworthy multimodal systems.

Liyang Chen, Hongkai Chen, Yujun Cai et al.

Video-to-Audio generation has made remarkable strides in automatically synthesizing sound for video. However, existing evaluation metrics, which focus on semantic and temporal alignment, overlook a critical failure mode: models often generate acoustic events, particularly speech and music, that have no corresponding visual source. We term this phenomenon Insertion Hallucination and identify it as a systemic risk driven by dataset biases, such as the prevalence of off-screen sounds, that remains completely undetected by current metrics. To address this challenge, we first develop a systematic evaluation framework that employs a majority-voting ensemble of multiple audio event detectors. We also introduce two novel metrics to quantify the prevalence and severity of this issue: IH@vid (the fraction of videos with hallucinations) and IH@dur (the fraction of hallucinated duration). Building on this, we propose Posterior Feature Correction, a novel training-free inference-time method that mitigates IH. PFC operates in a two-pass process: it first generates an initial audio output to detect hallucinated segments, and then regenerates the audio after masking the corresponding video features at those timestamps. Experiments on several mainstream V2A benchmarks first reveal that state-of-the-art models suffer from severe IH. In contrast, our PFC method reduces both the prevalence and duration of hallucinations by over 50\% on average, without degrading, and in some cases even improving, conventional metrics for audio quality and temporal synchronization. Our work is the first to formally define, systematically measure, and effectively mitigate Insertion Hallucination, paving the way for more reliable and faithful V2A models.

Liyang Chen, Tianze Zhou, Xu He et al.

The visual dubbing task aims to generate mouth movements synchronized with the driving audio, which has seen significant progress in recent years. However, two critical deficiencies hinder their wide application: (1) Audio-only driving paradigms inadequately capture speaker-specific lip habits, which fail to generate lip movements similar to the target avatar; (2) Conventional blind-inpainting approaches frequently produce visual artifacts when handling obstructions (e.g., microphones, hands), limiting practical deployment. In this paper, we propose StableDub, a novel and concise framework integrating lip-habit-aware modeling with occlusion-robust synthesis. Specifically, building upon the Stable-Diffusion backbone, we develop a lip-habit-modulated mechanism that jointly models phonemic audio-visual synchronization and speaker-specific orofacial dynamics. To achieve plausible lip geometries and object appearances under occlusion, we introduce the occlusion-aware training strategy by explicitly exposing the occlusion objects to the inpainting process. By incorporating the proposed designs, the model eliminates the necessity for cost-intensive priors in previous methods, thereby exhibiting superior training efficiency on the computationally intensive diffusion-based backbone. To further optimize training efficiency from the perspective of model architecture, we introduce a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture, which demonstrates the enhanced applicability in low-resource research scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that StableDub achieves superior performance in lip habit resemblance and occlusion robustness. Our method also surpasses other methods in audio-lip sync, video quality, and resolution consistency. We expand the applicability of visual dubbing methods from comprehensive aspects, and demo videos can be found at https://stabledub.github.io.

Liyang Chen, Zhiyong Wu, Jun Ling et al.

We propose a novel robust and efficient Speech-to-Animation (S2A) approach for synchronized facial animation generation in human-computer interaction. Compared with conventional approaches, the proposed approach utilizes phonetic posteriorgrams (PPGs) of spoken phonemes as input to ensure the cross-language and cross-speaker ability, and introduces corresponding prosody features (i.e. pitch and energy) to further enhance the expression of generated animation. Mixture-of-experts (MOE)-based Transformer is employed to better model contextual information while provide significant optimization on computation efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on both objective and subjective evaluation with 17x inference speedup compared with the state-of-the-art approach.