Learn2Talk: 3D Talking Face Learns from 2D Talking Face

Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.

Towards a Simultaneous and Granular Identity-Expression Control in Personalized Face Generation

In human-centric content generation, the pre-trained text-to-image models struggle to produce user-wanted portrait images, which retain the identity of individuals while exhibiting diverse expressions. This paper introduces our efforts towards personalized face generation. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modal face generation framework, capable of simultaneous identity-expression control and more fine-grained expression synthesis. Our expression control is so sophisticated that it can be specialized by the fine-grained emotional vocabulary. We devise a novel diffusion model that can undertake the task of simultaneously face swapping and reenactment. Due to the entanglement of identity and expression, it's nontrivial to separately and precisely control them in one framework, thus has not been explored yet. To overcome this, we propose several innovative designs in the conditional diffusion model, including balancing identity and expression encoder, improved midpoint sampling, and explicitly background conditioning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the controllability and scalability of the proposed framework, in comparison with state-of-the-art text-to-image, face swapping, and face reenactment methods.

EMEF: Ensemble Multi-Exposure Image Fusion

Although remarkable progress has been made in recent years, current multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) research is still bounded by the lack of real ground truth, objective evaluation function, and robust fusion strategy. In this paper, we study the MEF problem from a new perspective. We don't utilize any synthesized ground truth, design any loss function, or develop any fusion strategy. Our proposed method EMEF takes advantage of the wisdom of multiple imperfect MEF contributors including both conventional and deep learning-based methods. Specifically, EMEF consists of two main stages: pre-train an imitator network and tune the imitator in the runtime. In the first stage, we make a unified network imitate different MEF targets in a style modulation way. In the second stage, we tune the imitator network by optimizing the style code, in order to find an optimal fusion result for each input pair. In the experiment, we construct EMEF from four state-of-the-art MEF methods and then make comparisons with the individuals and several other competitive methods on the latest released MEF benchmark dataset. The promising experimental results demonstrate that our ensemble framework can "get the best of all worlds". The code is available at https://github.com/medalwill/EMEF.