Total-Editing: Head Avatar with Editable Appearance, Motion, and Lighting

Face reenactment and portrait relighting are essential tasks in portrait editing, yet they are typically addressed independently, without much synergy. Most face reenactment methods prioritize motion control and multiview consistency, while portrait relighting focuses on adjusting shading effects. To take advantage of both geometric consistency and illumination awareness, we introduce Total-Editing, a unified portrait editing framework that enables precise control over appearance, motion, and lighting. Specifically, we design a neural radiance field decoder with intrinsic decomposition capabilities. This allows seamless integration of lighting information from portrait images or HDR environment maps into synthesized portraits. We also incorporate a moving least squares based deformation field to enhance the spatiotemporal coherence of avatar motion and shading effects. With these innovations, our unified framework significantly improves the quality and realism of portrait editing results. Further, the multi-source nature of Total-Editing supports more flexible applications, such as illumination transfer from one portrait to another, or portrait animation with customized backgrounds.

BecomingLit: Relightable Gaussian Avatars with Hybrid Neural Shading

We introduce BecomingLit, a novel method for reconstructing relightable, high-resolution head avatars that can be rendered from novel viewpoints at interactive rates. Therefore, we propose a new low-cost light stage capture setup, tailored specifically towards capturing faces. Using this setup, we collect a novel dataset consisting of diverse multi-view sequences of numerous subjects under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. By leveraging our new dataset, we introduce a new relightable avatar representation based on 3D Gaussian primitives that we animate with a parametric head model and an expression-dependent dynamics module. We propose a new hybrid neural shading approach, combining a neural diffuse BRDF with an analytical specular term. Our method reconstructs disentangled materials from our dynamic light stage recordings and enables all-frequency relighting of our avatars with both point lights and environment maps. In addition, our avatars can easily be animated and controlled from monocular videos. We validate our approach in extensive experiments on our dataset, where we consistently outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in relighting and reenactment by a significant margin.

WaveGuard: Robust Deepfake Detection and Source Tracing via Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet and Graph Neural Networks

Deepfake technology poses increasing risks such as privacy invasion and identity theft. To address these threats, we propose WaveGuard, a proactive watermarking framework that enhances robustness and imperceptibility via frequency-domain embedding and graph-based structural consistency. Specifically, we embed watermarks into high-frequency sub-bands using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) and employ a Structural Consistency Graph Neural Network (SC-GNN) to preserve visual quality. We also design an attention module to refine embedding precision. Experimental results on face swap and reenactment tasks demonstrate that WaveGuard outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both robustness and visual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/vpsg-research/WaveGuard.

MagicPortrait: Temporally Consistent Face Reenactment with 3D Geometric Guidance

In this paper, we propose a method for video face reenactment that integrates a 3D face parametric model into a latent diffusion framework, aiming to improve shape consistency and motion control in existing video-based face generation approaches. Our approach employs the FLAME (Faces Learned with an Articulated Model and Expressions) model as the 3D face parametric representation, providing a unified framework for modeling face expressions and head pose. This enables precise extraction of detailed face geometry and motion features from driving videos. Specifically, we enhance the latent diffusion model with rich 3D expression and detailed pose information by incorporating depth maps, normal maps, and rendering maps derived from FLAME sequences. A multi-layer face movements fusion module with integrated self-attention mechanisms is used to combine identity and motion latent features within the spatial domain. By utilizing the 3D face parametric model as motion guidance, our method enables parametric alignment of face identity between the reference image and the motion captured from the driving video. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method excels at generating high-quality face animations with precise expression and head pose variation modeling. In addition, it demonstrates strong generalization performance on out-of-domain images. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/weimengting/MagicPortrait.

InteractAvatar: Modeling Hand-Face Interaction in Photorealistic Avatars with Deformable Gaussians

With the rising interest from the community in digital avatars coupled with the importance of expressions and gestures in communication, modeling natural avatar behavior remains an important challenge across many industries such as teleconferencing, gaming, and AR/VR. Human hands are the primary tool for interacting with the environment and essential for realistic human behavior modeling, yet existing 3D hand and head avatar models often overlook the crucial aspect of hand-body interactions, such as between hand and face. We present InteracttAvatar, the first model to faithfully capture the photorealistic appearance of dynamic hand and non-rigid hand-face interactions. Our novel Dynamic Gaussian Hand model, combining template model and 3D Gaussian Splatting as well as a dynamic refinement module, captures pose-dependent change, e.g. the fine wrinkles and complex shadows that occur during articulation. Importantly, our hand-face interaction module models the subtle geometry and appearance dynamics that underlie common gestures. Through experiments of novel view synthesis, self reenactment and cross-identity reenactment, we demonstrate that InteracttAvatar can reconstruct hand and hand-face interactions from monocular or multiview videos with high-fidelity details and be animated with novel poses.

Detecting Localized Deepfake Manipulations Using Action Unit-Guided Video Representations

With rapid advancements in generative modeling, deepfake techniques are increasingly narrowing the gap between real and synthetic videos, raising serious privacy and security concerns. Beyond traditional face swapping and reenactment, an emerging trend in recent state-of-the-art deepfake generation methods involves localized edits such as subtle manipulations of specific facial features like raising eyebrows, altering eye shapes, or modifying mouth expressions. These fine-grained manipulations pose a significant challenge for existing detection models, which struggle to capture such localized variations. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first detection approach explicitly designed to generalize to localized edits in deepfake videos by leveraging spatiotemporal representations guided by facial action units. Our method leverages a cross-attention-based fusion of representations learned from pretext tasks like random masking and action unit detection, to create an embedding that effectively encodes subtle, localized changes. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple deepfake generation methods demonstrate that our approach, despite being trained solely on the traditional FF+ dataset, sets a new benchmark in detecting recent deepfake-generated videos with fine-grained local edits, achieving a $20\%$ improvement in accuracy over current state-of-the-art detection methods. Additionally, our method delivers competitive performance on standard datasets, highlighting its robustness and generalization across diverse types of local and global forgeries.

Two-Stream Spatial-Temporal Transformer Framework for Person Identification via Natural Conversational Keypoints

In the age of AI-driven generative technologies, traditional biometric recognition systems face unprecedented challenges, particularly from sophisticated deepfake and face reenactment techniques. In this study, we propose a Two-Stream Spatial-Temporal Transformer Framework for person identification using upper body keypoints visible during online conversations, which we term conversational keypoints. Our framework processes both spatial relationships between keypoints and their temporal evolution through two specialized branches: a Spatial Transformer (STR) that learns distinctive structural patterns in keypoint configurations, and a Temporal Transformer (TTR) that captures sequential motion patterns. Using the state-of-the-art Sapiens pose estimator, we extract 133 keypoints (based on COCO-WholeBody format) representing facial features, head pose, and hand positions. The framework was evaluated on a dataset of 114 individuals engaged in natural conversations, achieving recognition accuracies of 80.12% for the spatial stream, 63.61% for the temporal stream. We then explored two fusion strategies: a shared loss function approach achieving 82.22% accuracy, and a feature-level fusion method that concatenates feature maps from both streams, significantly improving performance to 94.86%. By jointly modeling both static anatomical relationships and dynamic movement patterns, our approach learns comprehensive identity signatures that are more robust to spoofing than traditional appearance-based methods.

GHOST 2.0: generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads

While the task of face swapping has recently gained attention in the research community, a related problem of head swapping remains largely unexplored. In addition to skin color transfer, head swap poses extra challenges, such as the need to preserve structural information of the whole head during synthesis and inpaint gaps between swapped head and background. In this paper, we address these concerns with GHOST 2.0, which consists of two problem-specific modules. First, we introduce enhanced Aligner model for head reenactment, which preserves identity information at multiple scales and is robust to extreme pose variations. Secondly, we use a Blender module that seamlessly integrates the reenacted head into the target background by transferring skin color and inpainting mismatched regions. Both modules outperform the baselines on the corresponding tasks, allowing to achieve state of the art results in head swapping. We also tackle complex cases, such as large difference in hair styles of source and target. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-forever/ghost-2.0

Generating and Detecting Various Types of Fake Image and Audio Content: A Review of Modern Deep Learning Technologies and Tools

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in deepfake generation and detection, focusing on modern deep learning technologies and tools based on the latest scientific advancements. The rise of deepfakes, leveraging techniques like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Diffusion models and other generative models, presents significant threats to privacy, security, and democracy. This fake media can deceive individuals, discredit real people and organizations, facilitate blackmail, and even threaten the integrity of legal, political, and social systems. Therefore, finding appropriate solutions to counter the potential threats posed by this technology is essential. We explore various deepfake methods, including face swapping, voice conversion, reenactment and lip synchronization, highlighting their applications in both benign and malicious contexts. The review critically examines the ongoing "arms race" between deepfake generation and detection, analyzing the challenges in identifying manipulated contents. By examining current methods and highlighting future research directions, this paper contributes to a crucial understanding of this rapidly evolving field and the urgent need for robust detection strategies to counter the misuse of this powerful technology. While focusing primarily on audio, image, and video domains, this study allows the reader to easily grasp the latest advancements in deepfake generation and detection.

G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation

Animating human face images aims to synthesize a desired source identity in a natural-looking way mimicking a driving video's facial movements. In this context, Generative Adversarial Networks have demonstrated remarkable potential in real-time face reenactment using a single source image, yet are constrained by limited geometry consistency compared to graphic-based approaches. In this paper, we introduce Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation (G3FA) to tackle this limitation. Our novel approach empowers the face animation model to incorporate 3D information using only 2D images, improving the image generation capabilities of the talking head synthesis model. We integrate inverse rendering techniques to extract 3D facial geometry properties, improving the feedback loop to the generator through a weighted average ensemble of discriminators. In our face reenactment model, we leverage 2D motion warping to capture motion dynamics along with orthogonal ray sampling and volume rendering techniques to produce the ultimate visual output. To evaluate the performance of our G3FA, we conducted comprehensive experiments using various evaluation protocols on VoxCeleb2 and TalkingHead benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework compared to the state-of-the-art real-time face animation methods.