KLASSify to Verify: Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection Using SSL-based Audio and Handcrafted Visual Features

The rapid development of audio-driven talking head generators and advanced Text-To-Speech (TTS) models has led to more sophisticated temporal deepfakes. These advances highlight the need for robust methods capable of detecting and localizing deepfakes, even under novel, unseen attack scenarios. Current state-of-the-art deepfake detectors, while accurate, are often computationally expensive and struggle to generalize to novel manipulation techniques. To address these challenges, we propose multimodal approaches for the AV-Deepfake1M 2025 challenge. For the visual modality, we leverage handcrafted features to improve interpretability and adaptability. For the audio modality, we adapt a self-supervised learning (SSL) backbone coupled with graph attention networks to capture rich audio representations, improving detection robustness. Our approach strikes a balance between performance and real-world deployment, focusing on resilience and potential interpretability. On the AV-Deepfake1M++ dataset, our multimodal system achieves AUC of 92.78% for deepfake classification task and IoU of 0.3536 for temporal localization using only the audio modality.

RAP: Real-time Audio-driven Portrait Animation with Video Diffusion Transformer

Audio-driven portrait animation aims to synthesize realistic and natural talking head videos from an input audio signal and a single reference image. While existing methods achieve high-quality results by leveraging high-dimensional intermediate representations and explicitly modeling motion dynamics, their computational complexity renders them unsuitable for real-time deployment. Real-time inference imposes stringent latency and memory constraints, often necessitating the use of highly compressed latent representations. However, operating in such compact spaces hinders the preservation of fine-grained spatiotemporal details, thereby complicating audio-visual synchronization RAP (Real-time Audio-driven Portrait animation), a unified framework for generating high-quality talking portraits under real-time constraints. Specifically, RAP introduces a hybrid attention mechanism for fine-grained audio control, and a static-dynamic training-inference paradigm that avoids explicit motion supervision. Through these techniques, RAP achieves precise audio-driven control, mitigates long-term temporal drift, and maintains high visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAP achieves state-of-the-art performance while operating under real-time constraints.

JOLT3D: Joint Learning of Talking Heads and 3DMM Parameters with Application to Lip-Sync

In this work, we revisit the effectiveness of 3DMM for talking head synthesis by jointly learning a 3D face reconstruction model and a talking head synthesis model. This enables us to obtain a FACS-based blendshape representation of facial expressions that is optimized for talking head synthesis. This contrasts with previous methods that either fit 3DMM parameters to 2D landmarks or rely on pretrained face reconstruction models. Not only does our approach increase the quality of the generated face, but it also allows us to take advantage of the blendshape representation to modify just the mouth region for the purpose of audio-based lip-sync. To this end, we propose a novel lip-sync pipeline that, unlike previous methods, decouples the original chin contour from the lip-synced chin contour, and reduces flickering near the mouth.

Is It Really You? Exploring Biometric Verification Scenarios in Photorealistic Talking-Head Avatar Videos

Photorealistic talking-head avatars are becoming increasingly common in virtual meetings, gaming, and social platforms. These avatars allow for more immersive communication, but they also introduce serious security risks. One emerging threat is impersonation: an attacker can steal a user's avatar-preserving their appearance and voice-making it nearly impossible to detect its fraudulent usage by sight or sound alone. In this paper, we explore the challenge of biometric verification in such avatar-mediated scenarios. Our main question is whether an individual's facial motion patterns can serve as reliable behavioral biometrics to verify their identity when the avatar's visual appearance is a facsimile of its owner. To answer this question, we introduce a new dataset of realistic avatar videos created using a state-of-the-art one-shot avatar generation model, GAGAvatar, with genuine and impostor avatar videos. We also propose a lightweight, explainable spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Network architecture with temporal attention pooling, that uses only facial landmarks to model dynamic facial gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that facial motion cues enable meaningful identity verification with AUC values approaching 80%. The proposed benchmark and biometric system are available for the research community in order to bring attention to the urgent need for more advanced behavioral biometric defenses in avatar-based communication systems.

FixTalk: Taming Identity Leakage for High-Quality Talking Head Generation in Extreme Cases

Talking head generation is gaining significant importance across various domains, with a growing demand for high-quality rendering. However, existing methods often suffer from identity leakage (IL) and rendering artifacts (RA), particularly in extreme cases. Through an in-depth analysis of previous approaches, we identify two key insights: (1) IL arises from identity information embedded within motion features, and (2) this identity information can be leveraged to address RA. Building on these findings, this paper introduces FixTalk, a novel framework designed to simultaneously resolve both issues for high-quality talking head generation. Firstly, we propose an Enhanced Motion Indicator (EMI) to effectively decouple identity information from motion features, mitigating the impact of IL on generated talking heads. To address RA, we introduce an Enhanced Detail Indicator (EDI), which utilizes the leaked identity information to supplement missing details, thus fixing the artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FixTalk effectively mitigates IL and RA, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

MEDTalk: Multimodal Controlled 3D Facial Animation with Dynamic Emotions by Disentangled Embedding

Audio-driven emotional 3D facial animation aims to generate synchronized lip movements and vivid facial expressions. However, most existing approaches focus on static and predefined emotion labels, limiting their diversity and naturalness. To address these challenges, we propose MEDTalk, a novel framework for fine-grained and dynamic emotional talking head generation. Our approach first disentangles content and emotion embedding spaces from motion sequences using a carefully designed cross-reconstruction process, enabling independent control over lip movements and facial expressions. Beyond conventional audio-driven lip synchronization, we integrate audio and speech text, predicting frame-wise intensity variations and dynamically adjusting static emotion features to generate realistic emotional expressions. Furthermore, to enhance control and personalization, we incorporate multimodal inputs-including text descriptions and reference expression images-to guide the generation of user-specified facial expressions. With MetaHuman as the priority, our generated results can be conveniently integrated into the industrial production pipeline.

Bind-Your-Avatar: Multi-Talking-Character Video Generation with Dynamic 3D-mask-based Embedding Router

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in audio-driven talking head generation. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on single-character scenarios. While some methods can create separate conversation videos between two individuals, the critical challenge of generating unified conversation videos with multiple physically co-present characters sharing the same spatial environment remains largely unaddressed. This setting presents two key challenges: audio-to-character correspondence control and the lack of suitable datasets featuring multi-character talking videos within the same scene. To address these challenges, we introduce Bind-Your-Avatar, an MM-DiT-based model specifically designed for multi-talking-character video generation in the same scene. Specifically, we propose (1) A novel framework incorporating a fine-grained Embedding Router that binds `who' and `speak what' together to address the audio-to-character correspondence control. (2) Two methods for implementing a 3D-mask embedding router that enables frame-wise, fine-grained control of individual characters, with distinct loss functions based on observed geometric priors and a mask refinement strategy to enhance the accuracy and temporal smoothness of the predicted masks. (3) The first dataset, to the best of our knowledge, specifically constructed for multi-talking-character video generation, and accompanied by an open-source data processing pipeline, and (4) A benchmark for the dual-talking-characters video generation, with extensive experiments demonstrating superior performance over multiple state-of-the-art methods.

FaceEditTalker: Interactive Talking Head Generation with Facial Attribute Editing

Recent advances in audio-driven talking head generation have achieved impressive results in lip synchronization and emotional expression. However, they largely overlook the crucial task of facial attribute editing. This capability is crucial for achieving deep personalization and expanding the range of practical applications, including user-tailored digital avatars, engaging online education content, and brand-specific digital customer service. In these key domains, the flexible adjustment of visual attributes-such as hairstyle, accessories, and subtle facial features is essential for aligning with user preferences, reflecting diverse brand identities, and adapting to varying contextual demands. In this paper, we present FaceEditTalker, a unified framework that enables controllable facial attribute manipulation while generating high-quality, audio-synchronized talking head videos. Our method consists of two key components: an image feature space editing module, which extracts semantic and detail features and allows flexible control over attributes like expression, hairstyle, and accessories; and an audio-driven video generation module, which fuses these edited features with audio-guided facial landmarks to drive a diffusion-based generator. This design ensures temporal coherence, visual fidelity, and identity preservation across frames. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in lip-sync accuracy, video quality, and attribute controllability. Project page: https://peterfanfan.github.io/FaceEditTalker/

GGTalker: Talking Head Systhesis with Generalizable Gaussian Priors and Identity-Specific Adaptation

Creating high-quality, generalizable speech-driven 3D talking heads remains a persistent challenge. Previous methods achieve satisfactory results for fixed viewpoints and small-scale audio variations, but they struggle with large head rotations and out-of-distribution (OOD) audio. Moreover, they are constrained by the need for time-consuming, identity-specific training. We believe the core issue lies in the lack of sufficient 3D priors, which limits the extrapolation capabilities of synthesized talking heads. To address this, we propose GGTalker, which synthesizes talking heads through a combination of generalizable priors and identity-specific adaptation. We introduce a two-stage Prior-Adaptation training strategy to learn Gaussian head priors and adapt to individual characteristics. We train Audio-Expression and Expression-Visual priors to capture the universal patterns of lip movements and the general distribution of head textures. During the Customized Adaptation, individual speaking styles and texture details are precisely modeled. Additionally, we introduce a color MLP to generate fine-grained, motion-aligned textures and a Body Inpainter to blend rendered results with the background, producing indistinguishable, photorealistic video frames. Comprehensive experiments show that GGTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance in rendering quality, 3D consistency, lip-sync accuracy, and training efficiency.

DualTalk: Dual-Speaker Interaction for 3D Talking Head Conversations

In face-to-face conversations, individuals need to switch between speaking and listening roles seamlessly. Existing 3D talking head generation models focus solely on speaking or listening, neglecting the natural dynamics of interactive conversation, which leads to unnatural interactions and awkward transitions. To address this issue, we propose a new task -- multi-round dual-speaker interaction for 3D talking head generation -- which requires models to handle and generate both speaking and listening behaviors in continuous conversation. To solve this task, we introduce DualTalk, a novel unified framework that integrates the dynamic behaviors of speakers and listeners to simulate realistic and coherent dialogue interactions. This framework not only synthesizes lifelike talking heads when speaking but also generates continuous and vivid non-verbal feedback when listening, effectively capturing the interplay between the roles. We also create a new dataset featuring 50 hours of multi-round conversations with over 1,000 characters, where participants continuously switch between speaking and listening roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the naturalness and expressiveness of 3D talking heads in dual-speaker conversations. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/dualtalk.