PC-Talk: Precise Facial Animation Control for Audio-Driven Talking Face Generation

2026-06-06 · Source: cs.AI updates on arXiv.org · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Robotics & Autonomous Systems, Gaming & Interactive Media · Depth: Expert, extended

Summary

The PC-Talk framework introduces a novel approach for precise facial animation control in audio-driven talking face generation, addressing limitations in speaking style and emotional expression. It operates through implicit keypoint deformations, featuring two core modules. The Lip-audio Alignment Control (LAC) module enables word-level editing of speaking styles and adjusts lip movement scales to simulate vocal loudness, maintaining lip synchronization. Concurrently, the EMotion Control (EMC) module generates vivid emotional facial features by isolating pure emotional deformations, allowing fine-grained intensity modification and combining multiple emotions across distinct facial regions. PC-Talk leverages semantically bonded implicit keypoints from LivePortrait and demonstrates strong performance on both HDTF and MEAD datasets, generating videos at 30 frames per second.

Key takeaway

For Machine Learning Engineers developing digital humans or voice assistants, PC-Talk offers a significant advancement in controllable talking face generation. You should consider integrating its implicit keypoint deformation approach to achieve precise word-level speaking style adjustments and nuanced emotional expressions. This framework allows fine-tuning lip movements for vocal loudness and combining complex emotions across facial regions, enhancing realism and user customization in your applications.

Key insights

PC-Talk enables precise, fine-grained control over lip-sync and emotional facial animation using implicit keypoint deformations.

Principles

• Implicit keypoints with semantic meaning allow fine-grained facial region control.
• Disentangling pure emotional deformation enhances expressive realism.
• Word-level style editing improves customization of lip movements.

Method

PC-Talk predicts lip-sync ($D_l$) and emotional ($D_e$) deformations of implicit keypoints. $D_e$ is derived by subtracting neutral from emotional combined deformations. These are combined with original keypoints ($K_{ori}$) to form driven keypoints ($K_d$), then rendered.

In practice

• Adjust lip movement scale to simulate vocal loudness.
• Combine distinct emotions across different facial regions.
• Edit speaking styles for specific phonemes like "duck" or "bee".

Topics

• Audio-Driven Talking Faces
• Facial Animation Control
• Implicit Keypoint Deformation
• Lip Synchronization
• Emotional Expression Synthesis
• Speaking Style Control

Code references

• mseitzer/pytorch-fid

Best for: Research Scientist, AI Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Computer Vision Engineer

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by cs.AI updates on arXiv.org.