RSATalker: Realistic Socially-Aware Talking Head Generation for Multi-Turn Conversation

Talking head generation is increasingly important in virtual reality (VR), especially for social scenarios involving multi-turn conversation. Existing approaches face notable limitations: mesh-based 3D methods can model dual-person dialogue but lack realistic textures, while large-model-based 2D methods produce natural appearances but incur prohibitive computational costs. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based methods achieve efficient and realistic rendering but remain speaker-only and ignore social relationships. We introduce RSATalker, the first framework that leverages 3DGS for realistic and socially-aware talking head generation with support for multi-turn conversation. Our method first drives mesh-based 3D facial motion from speech, then binds 3D Gaussians to mesh facets to render high-fidelity 2D avatar videos. To capture interpersonal dynamics, we propose a socially-aware module that encodes social relationships, including blood and non-blood as well as equal and unequal, into high-level embeddings through a learnable query mechanism. We design a three-stage training paradigm and construct the RSATalker dataset with speech-mesh-image triplets annotated with social relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSATalker achieves state-of-the-art performance in both realism and social awareness. The code and dataset will be released.

Aesthetics as Structural Harm: Algorithmic Lookism Across Text-to-Image Generation and Classification

This paper examines algorithmic lookism-the systematic preferential treatment based on physical appearance-in text-to-image (T2I) generative AI and a downstream gender classification task. Through the analysis of 26,400 synthetic faces created with Stable Diffusion 2.1 and 3.5 Medium, we demonstrate how generative AI models systematically associate facial attractiveness with positive attributes and vice-versa, mirroring socially constructed biases rather than evidence-based correlations. Furthermore, we find significant gender bias in three gender classification algorithms depending on the attributes of the input faces. Our findings reveal three critical harms: (1) the systematic encoding of attractiveness-positive attribute associations in T2I models; (2) gender disparities in classification systems, where women's faces, particularly those generated with negative attributes, suffer substantially higher misclassification rates than men's; and (3) intensifying aesthetic constraints in newer models through age homogenization, gendered exposure patterns, and geographic reductionism. These convergent patterns reveal algorithmic lookism as systematic infrastructure operating across AI vision systems, compounding existing inequalities through both representation and recognition. Disclaimer: This work includes visual and textual content that reflects stereotypical associations between physical appearance and socially constructed attributes, including gender, race, and traits associated with social desirability. Any such associations found in this study emerge from the biases embedded in generative AI systems-not from empirical truths or the authors' views.

EditEmoTalk: Controllable Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Continuous Expression Editing

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic and expressive facial motions directly from audio. While recent methods achieve high-quality lip synchronization, they often rely on discrete emotion categories, limiting continuous and fine-grained emotional control. We present EditEmoTalk, a controllable speech-driven 3D facial animation framework with continuous emotion editing. The key idea is a boundary-aware semantic embedding that learns the normal directions of inter-emotion decision boundaries, enabling a continuous expression manifold for smooth emotion manipulation. Moreover, we introduce an emotional consistency loss that enforces semantic alignment between the generated motion dynamics and the target emotion embedding through a mapping network, ensuring faithful emotional expression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EditEmoTalk achieves superior controllability, expressiveness, and generalization while maintaining accurate lip synchronization. Code and pretrained models will be released.

Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures for Facial Expression Recognition

This paper introduces a novel application of Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (V-JEPAs) for Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Departing from conventional pre-training methods for video understanding that rely on pixel-level reconstructions, V-JEPAs learn by predicting embeddings of masked regions from the embeddings of unmasked regions. This enables the trained encoder to not capture irrelevant information about a given video like the color of a region of pixels in the background. Using a pre-trained V-JEPA video encoder, we train shallow classifiers using the RAVDESS and CREMA-D datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on RAVDESS and outperforming all other vision-based methods on CREMA-D (+1.48 WAR). Furthermore, cross-dataset evaluations reveal strong generalization capabilities, demonstrating the potential of purely embedding-based pre-training approaches to advance FER. We release our code at https://github.com/lennarteingunia/vjepa-for-fer.

MoCha:End-to-End Video Character Replacement without Structural Guidance

Controllable video character replacement with a user-provided identity remains a challenging problem due to the lack of paired video data. Prior works have predominantly relied on a reconstruction-based paradigm that requires per-frame segmentation masks and explicit structural guidance (e.g., skeleton, depth). This reliance, however, severely limits their generalizability in complex scenarios involving occlusions, character-object interactions, unusual poses, or challenging illumination, often leading to visual artifacts and temporal inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose MoCha, a pioneering framework that bypasses these limitations by requiring only a single arbitrary frame mask. To effectively adapt the multi-modal input condition and enhance facial identity, we introduce a condition-aware RoPE and employ an RL-based post-training stage. Furthermore, to overcome the scarcity of qualified paired-training data, we propose a comprehensive data construction pipeline. Specifically, we design three specialized datasets: a high-fidelity rendered dataset built with Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), an expression-driven dataset synthesized by current portrait animation techniques, and an augmented dataset derived from existing video-mask pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We will release the code to facilitate further research. Please refer to our project page for more details: orange-3dv-team.github.io/MoCha

Diffusion-Driven Deceptive Patches: Adversarial Manipulation and Forensic Detection in Facial Identity Verification

This work presents an end-to-end pipeline for generating, refining, and evaluating adversarial patches to compromise facial biometric systems, with applications in forensic analysis and security testing. We utilize FGSM to generate adversarial noise targeting an identity classifier and employ a diffusion model with reverse diffusion to enhance imperceptibility through Gaussian smoothing and adaptive brightness correction, thereby facilitating synthetic adversarial patch evasion. The refined patch is applied to facial images to test its ability to evade recognition systems while maintaining natural visual characteristics. A Vision Transformer (ViT)-GPT2 model generates captions to provide a semantic description of a person's identity for adversarial images, supporting forensic interpretation and documentation for identity evasion and recognition attacks. The pipeline evaluates changes in identity classification, captioning results, and vulnerabilities in facial identity verification and expression recognition under adversarial conditions. We further demonstrate effective detection and analysis of adversarial patches and adversarial samples using perceptual hashing and segmentation, achieving an SSIM of 0.95.

Now You See Me, Now You Don't: A Unified Framework for Expression Consistent Anonymization in Talking Head Videos

Face video anonymization is aimed at privacy preservation while allowing for the analysis of videos in a number of computer vision downstream tasks such as expression recognition, people tracking, and action recognition. We propose here a novel unified framework referred to as Anon-NET, streamlined to de-identify facial videos, while preserving age, gender, race, pose, and expression of the original video. Specifically, we inpaint faces by a diffusion-based generative model guided by high-level attribute recognition and motion-aware expression transfer. We then animate deidentified faces by video-driven animation, which accepts the de-identified face and the original video as input. Extensive experiments on the datasets VoxCeleb2, CelebV-HQ, and HDTF, which include diverse facial dynamics, demonstrate the effectiveness of AnonNET in obfuscating identity while retaining visual realism and temporal consistency. The code of AnonNet will be publicly released.

Deep Learning Based Facial Retargeting Using Local Patches

In the era of digital animation, the quest to produce lifelike facial animations for virtual characters has led to the development of various retargeting methods. While the retargeting facial motion between models of similar shapes has been very successful, challenges arise when the retargeting is performed on stylized or exaggerated 3D characters that deviate significantly from human facial structures. In this scenario, it is important to consider the target character's facial structure and possible range of motion to preserve the semantics assumed by the original facial motions after the retargeting. To achieve this, we propose a local patch-based retargeting method that transfers facial animations captured in a source performance video to a target stylized 3D character. Our method consists of three modules. The Automatic Patch Extraction Module extracts local patches from the source video frame. These patches are processed through the Reenactment Module to generate correspondingly re-enacted target local patches. The Weight Estimation Module calculates the animation parameters for the target character at every frame for the creation of a complete facial animation sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can successfully transfer the semantic meaning of source facial expressions to stylized characters with considerable variations in facial feature proportion.

Instruction-Driven 3D Facial Expression Generation and Transition

A 3D avatar typically has one of six cardinal facial expressions. To simulate realistic emotional variation, we should be able to render a facial transition between two arbitrary expressions. This study presents a new framework for instruction-driven facial expression generation that produces a 3D face and, starting from an image of the face, transforms the facial expression from one designated facial expression to another. The Instruction-driven Facial Expression Decomposer (IFED) module is introduced to facilitate multimodal data learning and capture the correlation between textual descriptions and facial expression features. Subsequently, we propose the Instruction to Facial Expression Transition (I2FET) method, which leverages IFED and a vertex reconstruction loss function to refine the semantic comprehension of latent vectors, thus generating a facial expression sequence according to the given instruction. Lastly, we present the Facial Expression Transition model to generate smooth transitions between facial expressions. Extensive evaluation suggests that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the CK+ and CelebV-HQ datasets. The results show that our framework can generate facial expression trajectories according to text instruction. Considering that text prompts allow us to make diverse descriptions of human emotional states, the repertoire of facial expressions and the transitions between them can be expanded greatly. We expect our framework to find various practical applications More information about our project can be found at https://vohoanganh.github.io/tg3dfet/

End-to-End Video Character Replacement without Structural Guidance

Controllable video character replacement with a user-provided identity remains a challenging problem due to the lack of paired video data. Prior works have predominantly relied on a reconstruction-based paradigm that requires per-frame segmentation masks and explicit structural guidance (e.g., skeleton, depth). This reliance, however, severely limits their generalizability in complex scenarios involving occlusions, character-object interactions, unusual poses, or challenging illumination, often leading to visual artifacts and temporal inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose MoCha, a pioneering framework that bypasses these limitations by requiring only a single arbitrary frame mask. To effectively adapt the multi-modal input condition and enhance facial identity, we introduce a condition-aware RoPE and employ an RL-based post-training stage. Furthermore, to overcome the scarcity of qualified paired-training data, we propose a comprehensive data construction pipeline. Specifically, we design three specialized datasets: a high-fidelity rendered dataset built with Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), an expression-driven dataset synthesized by current portrait animation techniques, and an augmented dataset derived from existing video-mask pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We will release the code to facilitate further research. Please refer to our project page for more details: orange-3dv-team.github.io/MoCha