AsymK-Talker: Real-Time and Long-Horizon Talking Head Generation via Asymmetric Kernel Distillation
This work addresses the need for real-time, temporally coherent talking head generation in applications like virtual avatars and video conferencing.
AsymK-Talker introduces a diffusion-distillation method for real-time, long-horizon talking head generation, achieving high visual fidelity and lip synchronization while overcoming causal inefficiency and progressive drift.
Recent advances in diffusion models have markedly enhanced the visual fidelity of audio-driven talking head generation. Nevertheless, existing methods are constrained by three critical limitations: causal inefficiency that impedes real-time inference, incompatibility with temporally coherent conditioning, and progressive drift over long-horizon generation, collectively hindering their deployment in real-time applications. To overcome these challenges, we introduce AsymK-Talker, a novel diffusion-distillation method designed for real-time and long-horizon talking head generation. AsymK-Talker comprises three key components: (1) Kernel-Conditioned Loop Generation (KCLG), a causal, chunk-wise generation paradigm that leverages motion kernels to enable temporally consistent propagation; (2) Temporal Reference Encoding (TRE), which converts a static identity reference into a time-aware latent representation to enhance audio-visual synchronization; and (3) Asymmetric Kernel Distillation (AKD), a teacher-student distillation framework wherein the teacher model conditions on ground-truth motion kernels for supervision, while the student learns to generate from generated kernels, thereby ensuring robustness during extended generation sequences. AsymK-Talker achieves promising results on both visual fidelity and lip synchronization metrics.