JoyVASA: Portrait and Animal Image Animation with Diffusion-Based Audio-Driven Facial Dynamics and Head Motion Generation
This work addresses inefficiencies in training and inference for audio-driven facial animation, with potential applications in entertainment and communication, though it appears incremental by building on existing diffusion-based models.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficiencies and constraints in audio-driven portrait animation by proposing JoyVASA, a diffusion-based method that decouples facial expressions from static 3D representations and uses a diffusion transformer for motion generation, enabling longer videos and seamless animation of both human and animal faces.
Audio-driven portrait animation has made significant advances with diffusion-based models, improving video quality and lipsync accuracy. However, the increasing complexity of these models has led to inefficiencies in training and inference, as well as constraints on video length and inter-frame continuity. In this paper, we propose JoyVASA, a diffusion-based method for generating facial dynamics and head motion in audio-driven facial animation. Specifically, in the first stage, we introduce a decoupled facial representation framework that separates dynamic facial expressions from static 3D facial representations. This decoupling allows the system to generate longer videos by combining any static 3D facial representation with dynamic motion sequences. Then, in the second stage, a diffusion transformer is trained to generate motion sequences directly from audio cues, independent of character identity. Finally, a generator trained in the first stage uses the 3D facial representation and the generated motion sequences as inputs to render high-quality animations. With the decoupled facial representation and the identity-independent motion generation process, JoyVASA extends beyond human portraits to animate animal faces seamlessly. The model is trained on a hybrid dataset of private Chinese and public English data, enabling multilingual support. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach. Future work will focus on improving real-time performance and refining expression control, further expanding the applications in portrait animation. The code is available at: https://github.com/jdh-algo/JoyVASA.