Democratizing High-Fidelity Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation

Co-speech gesture video generation aims to synthesize realistic, audio-aligned videos of speakers, complete with synchronized facial expressions and body gestures. This task presents challenges due to the significant one-to-many mapping between audio and visual content, further complicated by the scarcity of large-scale public datasets and high computational demands. We propose a lightweight framework that utilizes 2D full-body skeletons as an efficient auxiliary condition to bridge audio signals with visual outputs. Our approach introduces a diffusion model conditioned on fine-grained audio segments and a skeleton extracted from the speaker's reference image, predicting skeletal motions through skeleton-audio feature fusion to ensure strict audio coordination and body shape consistency. The generated skeletons are then fed into an off-the-shelf human video generation model with the speaker's reference image to synthesize high-fidelity videos. To democratize research, we present CSG-405-the first public dataset with 405 hours of high-resolution videos across 71 speech types, annotated with 2D skeletons and diverse speaker demographics. Experiments show that our method exceeds state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality and synchronization while generalizing across speakers and contexts.

Longitudinal Study of Facial Biometrics at the BEZ: Temporal Variance Analysis

This study presents findings from long-term biometric evaluations conducted at the Biometric Evaluation Center (bez). Over the course of two and a half years, our ongoing research with over 400 participants representing diverse ethnicities, genders, and age groups were regularly assessed using a variety of biometric tools and techniques at the controlled testing facilities. Our findings are based on the General Data Protection Regulation-compliant local bez database with more than 238.000 biometric data sets categorized into multiple biometric modalities such as face and finger. We used state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms to analyze long-term comparison scores. Our results show that these scores fluctuate more significantly between individual days than over the entire measurement period. These findings highlight the importance of testing biometric characteristics of the same individuals over a longer period of time in a controlled measurement environment and lays the groundwork for future advancements in biometric data analysis.

4KAgent: Agentic Any Image to 4K Super-Resolution

We present 4KAgent, a unified agentic super-resolution generalist system designed to universally upscale any image to 4K resolution (and even higher, if applied iteratively). Our system can transform images from extremely low resolutions with severe degradations, for example, highly distorted inputs at 256x256, into crystal-clear, photorealistic 4K outputs. 4KAgent comprises three core components: (1) Profiling, a module that customizes the 4KAgent pipeline based on bespoke use cases; (2) A Perception Agent, which leverages vision-language models alongside image quality assessment experts to analyze the input image and make a tailored restoration plan; and (3) A Restoration Agent, which executes the plan, following a recursive execution-reflection paradigm, guided by a quality-driven mixture-of-expert policy to select the optimal output for each step. Additionally, 4KAgent embeds a specialized face restoration pipeline, significantly enhancing facial details in portrait and selfie photos. We rigorously evaluate our 4KAgent across 11 distinct task categories encompassing a total of 26 diverse benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art on a broad spectrum of imaging domains. Our evaluations cover natural images, portrait photos, AI-generated content, satellite imagery, fluorescence microscopy, and medical imaging like fundoscopy, ultrasound, and X-ray, demonstrating superior performance in terms of both perceptual (e.g., NIQE, MUSIQ) and fidelity (e.g., PSNR) metrics. By establishing a novel agentic paradigm for low-level vision tasks, we aim to catalyze broader interest and innovation within vision-centric autonomous agents across diverse research communities. We will release all the code, models, and results at: https://4kagent.github.io.

CAST-Phys: Contactless Affective States Through Physiological signals Database

In recent years, affective computing and its applications have become a fast-growing research topic. Despite significant advancements, the lack of affective multi-modal datasets remains a major bottleneck in developing accurate emotion recognition systems. Furthermore, the use of contact-based devices during emotion elicitation often unintentionally influences the emotional experience, reducing or altering the genuine spontaneous emotional response. This limitation highlights the need for methods capable of extracting affective cues from multiple modalities without physical contact, such as remote physiological emotion recognition. To address this, we present the Contactless Affective States Through Physiological Signals Database (CAST-Phys), a novel high-quality dataset explicitly designed for multi-modal remote physiological emotion recognition using facial and physiological cues. The dataset includes diverse physiological signals, such as photoplethysmography (PPG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and respiration rate (RR), alongside high-resolution uncompressed facial video recordings, enabling the potential for remote signal recovery. Our analysis highlights the crucial role of physiological signals in realistic scenarios where facial expressions alone may not provide sufficient emotional information. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of remote multi-modal emotion recognition by evaluating the impact of individual and fused modalities, showcasing its effectiveness in advancing contactless emotion recognition technologies.

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.

VisualSpeaker: Visually-Guided 3D Avatar Lip Synthesis

Realistic, high-fidelity 3D facial animations are crucial for expressive avatar systems in human-computer interaction and accessibility. Although prior methods show promising quality, their reliance on the mesh domain limits their ability to fully leverage the rapid visual innovations seen in 2D computer vision and graphics. We propose VisualSpeaker, a novel method that bridges this gap using photorealistic differentiable rendering, supervised by visual speech recognition, for improved 3D facial animation. Our contribution is a perceptual lip-reading loss, derived by passing photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting avatar renders through a pre-trained Visual Automatic Speech Recognition model during training. Evaluation on the MEAD dataset demonstrates that VisualSpeaker improves both the standard Lip Vertex Error metric by 56.1% and the perceptual quality of the generated animations, while retaining the controllability of mesh-driven animation. This perceptual focus naturally supports accurate mouthings, essential cues that disambiguate similar manual signs in sign language avatars.

HyperGaussians: High-Dimensional Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Animatable Face Avatars

We introduce HyperGaussians, a novel extension of 3D Gaussian Splatting for high-quality animatable face avatars. Creating such detailed face avatars from videos is a challenging problem and has numerous applications in augmented and virtual reality. While tremendous successes have been achieved for static faces, animatable avatars from monocular videos still fall in the uncanny valley. The de facto standard, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), represents a face through a collection of 3D Gaussian primitives. 3DGS excels at rendering static faces, but the state-of-the-art still struggles with nonlinear deformations, complex lighting effects, and fine details. While most related works focus on predicting better Gaussian parameters from expression codes, we rethink the 3D Gaussian representation itself and how to make it more expressive. Our insights lead to a novel extension of 3D Gaussians to high-dimensional multivariate Gaussians, dubbed 'HyperGaussians'. The higher dimensionality increases expressivity through conditioning on a learnable local embedding. However, splatting HyperGaussians is computationally expensive because it requires inverting a high-dimensional covariance matrix. We solve this by reparameterizing the covariance matrix, dubbed the 'inverse covariance trick'. This trick boosts the efficiency so that HyperGaussians can be seamlessly integrated into existing models. To demonstrate this, we plug in HyperGaussians into the state-of-the-art in fast monocular face avatars: FlashAvatar. Our evaluation on 19 subjects from 4 face datasets shows that HyperGaussians outperform 3DGS numerically and visually, particularly for high-frequency details like eyeglass frames, teeth, complex facial movements, and specular reflections.

L-VAE: Variational Auto-Encoder with Learnable Beta for Disentangled Representation

In this paper, we propose a novel model called Learnable VAE (L-VAE), which learns a disentangled representation together with the hyperparameters of the cost function. L-VAE can be considered as an extension of \b{eta}-VAE, wherein the hyperparameter, \b{eta}, is empirically adjusted. L-VAE mitigates the limitations of \b{eta}-VAE by learning the relative weights of the terms in the loss function to control the dynamic trade-off between disentanglement and reconstruction losses. In the proposed model, the weight of the loss terms and the parameters of the model architecture are learned concurrently. An additional regularization term is added to the loss function to prevent bias towards either reconstruction or disentanglement losses. Experimental analyses show that the proposed L-VAE finds an effective balance between reconstruction fidelity and disentangling the latent dimensions. Comparisons of the proposed L-VAE against \b{eta}-VAE, VAE, ControlVAE, DynamicVAE, and {\sigma}-VAE on datasets, such as dSprites, MPI3D-complex, Falcor3D, and Isaac3D reveals that L-VAE consistently provides the best or the second best performances measured by a set of disentanglement metrics. Moreover, qualitative experiments on CelebA dataset, confirm the success of the L-VAE model for disentangling the facial attributes.

RefTok: Reference-Based Tokenization for Video Generation

Effectively handling temporal redundancy remains a key challenge in learning video models. Prevailing approaches often treat each set of frames independently, failing to effectively capture the temporal dependencies and redundancies inherent in videos. To address this limitation, we introduce RefTok, a novel reference-based tokenization method capable of capturing complex temporal dynamics and contextual information. Our method encodes and decodes sets of frames conditioned on an unquantized reference frame. When decoded, RefTok preserves the continuity of motion and the appearance of objects across frames. For example, RefTok retains facial details despite head motion, reconstructs text correctly, preserves small patterns, and maintains the legibility of handwriting from the context. Across 4 video datasets (K600, UCF-101, BAIR Robot Pushing, and DAVIS), RefTok significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art tokenizers (Cosmos and MAGVIT) and improves all evaluated metrics (PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS) by an average of 36.7% at the same or higher compression ratios. When a video generation model is trained using RefTok's latents on the BAIR Robot Pushing task, the generations not only outperform MAGVIT-B but the larger MAGVIT-L, which has 4x more parameters, across all generation metrics by an average of 27.9%.

AvatarMakeup: Realistic Makeup Transfer for 3D Animatable Head Avatars

Similar to facial beautification in real life, 3D virtual avatars require personalized customization to enhance their visual appeal, yet this area remains insufficiently explored. Although current 3D Gaussian editing methods can be adapted for facial makeup purposes, these methods fail to meet the fundamental requirements for achieving realistic makeup effects: 1) ensuring a consistent appearance during drivable expressions, 2) preserving the identity throughout the makeup process, and 3) enabling precise control over fine details. To address these, we propose a specialized 3D makeup method named AvatarMakeup, leveraging a pretrained diffusion model to transfer makeup patterns from a single reference photo of any individual. We adopt a coarse-to-fine idea to first maintain the consistent appearance and identity, and then to refine the details. In particular, the diffusion model is employed to generate makeup images as supervision. Due to the uncertainties in diffusion process, the generated images are inconsistent across different viewpoints and expressions. Therefore, we propose a Coherent Duplication method to coarsely apply makeup to the target while ensuring consistency across dynamic and multiview effects. Coherent Duplication optimizes a global UV map by recoding the averaged facial attributes among the generated makeup images. By querying the global UV map, it easily synthesizes coherent makeup guidance from arbitrary views and expressions to optimize the target avatar. Given the coarse makeup avatar, we further enhance the makeup by incorporating a Refinement Module into the diffusion model to achieve high makeup quality. Experiments demonstrate that AvatarMakeup achieves state-of-the-art makeup transfer quality and consistency throughout animation.