https://arxiv.org/api/9I3Vnflcw49RkHlJkT3/tzl7Yb8 2026-09-16T17:45:07Z 20 328 0 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15746v1 2026-09-14T15:37:03Z

Automatic facial rigging across heterogeneous mesh topologies remains challenging because high-quality expression supervision is often tied to canonical templates, while deformation transfer to arbitrary meshes can introduce geometric artifacts and correspondence errors. We present TopoRig, a topology-agnostic facial rigging framework that predicts FACS-conditioned deformations directly on input mesh vertices while preserving the original topology. Starting from the ICT FaceKit expression model, we construct complementary supervision from accurate but template-biased common-topology rigs, topology-diverse but noisier transferred rigs, and targeted image-based cues for controls poorly captured by geometric transfer. TopoRig combines local surface geometry, landmark-relative semantic features, global shape context, and FACS controls to predict per-vertex displacements. We train on 3,496 generated identities using 45 non-gaze expression controls from the 53-control ICT FaceKit vocabulary. On held-out identities and unseen mesh topologies, TopoRig more faithfully reproduces the reference expression space than prior neural facial-rigging methods, while qualitative results show consistent localized deformations across diverse character geometries. Ablations demonstrate that semantic landmark features and complementary supervision improve cross-identity and cross-topology generalization. Overall, TopoRig amortizes heterogeneous and imperfect expression supervision into a single topology-preserving deformation model.

2026-09-14T15:37:03Z 15 pages, 6 figures. Project page: https://andrewjmfleet.github.io/TopoRig/ Andrew Fleet Soroush Mehraban Vida Adeli Cole Clifford Babak Taati http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30951v1 2026-08-31T15:22:05Z

The rapid development of generative portrait models has raised growing concerns about privacy leakage and identity misuse. In particular, audio-driven 3D talking face generation can reconstruct a reusable 3D portrait of a target person from a monocular video and animate it with arbitrary speech, making realistic identity impersonation alarmingly practical. Existing proactive defenses mainly operate in the visual domain by injecting subtle perturbations into acial regions to disrupt identity acquisition. However, such perturbations often compromise visual quality due to the strong structural priors and social sensitivity of human faces, and are easily weakened by common real-world transformations such as resizing. To overcome these limitations, we propose an imperceptible audio defense for audio-driven 3D talking face generation by shifting protection from the visual modality to the audio modality. Specifically,we exploit psychoacoustic masking to hide protective perturbations within perceptually masked frequency regions of the speech signal, thereby reducing perceptual distortion while suppressing reliable facial animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively degrades 3D talking face generation while preserving favorable perceptual quality. These findings highlight psychoacoustically guided audio perturbations as a practical and promising direction for privacy-preserving portrait protection.

2026-08-31T15:22:05Z Rui-Qing Sun Chen-Hao Cui Hui-Yang Zhao Tian Lan Zhijing Wu Xian-Ling Mao http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22655v1 2026-08-23T23:31:44Z

Creating re-topologized 3D facial meshes is essential for high-quality facial animation but remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. This dissertation explores more efficient approaches for capturing production-ready facial meshes through: (1) the development of VarIS, a custom light sphere for capturing high-resolution stereo geometry and reflectance maps; (2) analysis of camera parameters affecting automatic 2D and 3D landmarking; (3) synthetic-data methods for training neural face regression; and (4) techniques for improving neural multi-view face-shape regression. While VarIS enables photorealistic face capture, its operational and processing costs motivate a more scalable approach. A deep learning framework is therefore proposed to directly predict re-topologized facial meshes from synthetic multiview images generated with Visage Craft, an in-house physically based rendering system using an Appearance 3D Morphable Model (A3DMM). The system produces standardized meshes ready for rigging and animation with minimal human supervision. Results show that incorporating accurate camera intrinsics and extrinsics improves landmark accuracy and geometric consistency, while 3D landmark regularization further improves reconstruction quality.

2026-08-23T23:31:44Z Xiang Li http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16011v1 2026-08-19T07:47:02Z

Embodied conversational agents require synchronized full-body motion (body gestures and facial expressions) that aligns with speech and emotional state. Omni-modal large language models excel at multimodal understanding but produce only linguistic outputs, leaving a critical gap in embodied response generation. We identify and address a failure of emotion conditioning: like other conditional generators that under-use weak conditioning signals, a flow-matching model given both a rich audio embedding and a discrete emotion label suppresses the emotion, generating near-identical motion regardless of the specified emotion. We present EMODY Flow, a lightweight (around 35M parameters) flow-matching framework that attaches to a frozen Qwen-3 Omni model and reuses its internal Mimi audio-codecs to condition two parallel DiT generators - one for SMPL-X body pose, one for FLAME facial expressions. A training-time auxiliary emotion classifier restores emotion sensitivity by forcing generated motion to be emotion-identifiable. EMODY Flow sets a new state of the art on BEAT2 gesture quality, with FGD 0.302, Beat Correlation 0.853, and Diversity 24.62 - improving over the best prior results by 26%, 5%, and 62% respectively - and transfers to zero-shot facial animation on TFHP without domain-specific fine-tuning. Beyond these quantitative gains, the classifier yields clearly emotion-separated motion, which we demonstrate qualitatively through a multidimensional-scaling analysis of the generated gestures.

2026-08-19T07:47:02Z The 1st International Workshop on Joint Audio-Video Comprehension and Generation (JAV-CG), co-located with ACM Multimedia 2026 Harsh Kumar Agarwal Xavier Alameda-Pineda Olivier Perrotin 10.1145/3840475.3841439 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15296v1 2026-08-15T15:54:34Z

Audio-driven 3D facial animation is essential for advancing immersion and interactivity in virtual experiences. Although recent advances have shown promising capabilities, the training and evaluation of existing methods typically rely on ground-truth-based errors, which fall short of aligning with human preferences. To address this, we present a comprehensive framework that learns an automatic perceptual model from human preference data and leverages it to improve and evaluate the perceptual quality of audio-driven 3D facial animation. To begin with, we construct FMPair (Facial Motion Pairwise preference), the first human preference dataset for audio-driven 3D facial animation, which is built through a systematic annotation pipeline and comprises 65,574 annotated 3D facial motion pairs from 8,834 distinct in-the-wild audio clips. Based on the pairwise comparison dataset, we propose a Facial Motion Reward model, termed FMReward, which takes audio and 3D facial motion as inputs and predicts a perceptual quality score aligned with human preferences. Building upon FMReward, we further introduce Facial Motion reward Feedback Learning (FMFL), a direct fine-tuning algorithm that leverages a pretrained reward model to optimize diffusion-based audio-driven 3D facial animation models for better alignment with human preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FMReward over other metrics in aligning with human preferences and the effectiveness of FMFL in improving the perceptual quality of audio-driven 3D facial animation.

2026-08-15T15:54:34Z Accepted for publication in IEEE TVCG, 2026 Sijing Wu Yunhao Li Zhilin Gao Huiyu Duan Yucheng Zhu Guangtao Zhai Patrick Le Callet http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15110v1 2026-08-15T08:22:50Z

Emotional 3D talking head generation aims to synthesize expressive facial animations with accurate lip synchronization. However, existing methods often rely on discrete emotion categories, which fail to capture the continuous evolution of affect. They also overlook the temporal frequency mismatch between audio articulation and emotional expression. In this paper, we propose CETalk, an audio-driven 3D facial animation framework conditioned on continuous Valence--Arousal (VA) representations for fine-grained emotion control. CETalk predicts a sequence of FLAME parameters through three key components: a Dynamic Emotion Modulation Module that adaptively scales emotional intensity using audio-derived cues; a Multi-Scale Temporal Modeling mechanism that employs parallel branches to decouple high-frequency articulatory movements from low-frequency emotional dynamics; and a Dynamic Fusion Mechanism that integrates these multi-scale features via an adaptive gating network. To support training and evaluation, we construct 3D-VA-MEAD, a large-scale dataset with automatically estimated VA annotations and reconstructed 3D facial motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CETalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both lip-sync accuracy and emotional expressiveness, while enabling smooth and controllable emotion transitions.

2026-08-15T08:22:50Z 14 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables Peng Jia Li Dai Zhen Xiao Xueliang Liu Jia Li http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09186v1 2026-08-10T06:55:35Z

Text-driven 3D face generation and editing remains challenging due to the difficulty of translating long-form descriptions into fine-grained facial geometry. Existing methods primarily align global textual semantics with facial structures but often struggle to capture subtle local deformations, such as eyebrow tension, cheek contraction, and asymmetric mouth motions, resulting in limited geometric fidelity and editing precision. To facilitate fine-grained text-driven facial modeling, we first construct FaME-G2E, a large-scale multimodal dataset containing detailed text--mesh annotations and paired text--blendshape samples for unified 3D facial generation and editing. Based on this dataset, we propose RAGMesh, a retrieval-augmented framework that leverages text-correlated geometric priors to improve high-fidelity facial synthesis and editing. Specifically, the Multi-Scale Retrieval Fusion (MSRF) module retrieves semantically consistent global and regional facial priors and fuses them in the blendshape space, suppressing conflicting local deformations while preserving coherent deformation patterns. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive RAG-guided Supervision (AdaRAGS), a region-aware constraint that explicitly aligns textual semantics with corresponding facial regions, enhancing regional controllability and editing accuracy. Extensive experiments on FaME-G2E demonstrate that RAGMesh achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in local geometric accuracy, text-guided controllability, regional editing precision, and inference efficiency. Video demo is available at https://youtu.be/Yr0_XkpWcNk, and the source code and dataset will be released upon paper acceptance.

2026-08-10T06:55:35Z Hao Li Ju Dai Feng Zhou Mengting Shi Haofei Wang Zhen Song Wei Zhou Lei Li Junjun Pan http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08702v1 2026-08-09T13:33:26Z

Fine-grained facial expression recognition (FER) hinges on capturing subtle muscular cues that distinguish adjacent emotions. Yet capturing these cues presents a dilemma. Detector-based methods depend on fragile landmark pipelines, whereas we find that directly transferring foundation models such as DINOv3 under conventional global readouts can cause local evidence dilution: early global aggregation washes out sparse muscular signals and leaves persistent confusion between categories such as fear/surprise and sad/neutral. To recover this evidence, we propose SRE-FER, a readout-level regional residual evidence learning framework. Its core module, RERA, adds zero-initialized residual logits that refine class boundaries while preserving the backbone's global prediction. Training-time action unit (AU) guidance steers regional features toward expression-relevant areas using Facial Action Coding System (FACS)-based anatomical priors, without requiring an external facial pipeline at inference. An optional Full setting further routes sample-specific non-redundant tokens. On three benchmarks, SRE-FER attains 92.76% on RAF-DB, 91.32% on FERPlus, and 67.78% on AffectNet-7, demonstrating highly competitive performance compared to existing FER methods.

2026-08-09T13:33:26Z 10 pages, 5 figures.Accepted at the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR 2026) Jiaye Song Ruochen Zhang Yuliang Wang Jiaqi Wu http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04722v1 2026-08-05T11:43:21Z

Creating photorealistic 3D human avatars with realistic upper-body motion remains challenging. Existing approaches either focus on the head and overlook hand gestures, or reconstruct the full body but fail to preserve fine-grained facial fidelity and hand pose accuracy. As a result, current methods struggle to capture the subtle dynamics of facial expressions and hand gestures that are crucial for natural human communication. While methods based on full-body parametric models enable avatar reconstruction from monocular or multi-view inputs, they often lack accurate facial animation and detailed hand articulation. To address these limitations, we propose MVFGA, a novel multi-view-consistent pipeline for generating realistic upper-body avatars. Our approach models the face and hands separately and fuses them with a parametric upper-body mesh model, enabling the capture of fine-grained facial expressions and hand poses for accurate upper-body avatar reconstruction. We then splat 3D Gaussians onto the obtained mesh, enabling high-quality rendering of dynamic avatars from novel viewpoints. Furthermore, we introduce MVFGA-MoCap, a multi-view upper-body motion capture dataset featuring controlled facial expression sequences, diverse hand gestures, and free-form communication. Experiments show that MVFGA generates visually realistic avatars with high-fidelity facial expressions and hand motions, outperforming baselines for upper-body avatar animation. Project page: https://dfki-av.github.io/MVFGA/

2026-08-05T11:43:21Z Accepted at SCA 2026 Computer Graphics Forum, 45(8), 2026 Alireza Javanmardi Vippin Kumar Jeetmal Christen Millerdurai Alain Pagani Didier Stricker 10.1111/cgf.70567 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06408v1 2026-08-03T11:28:19Z

Audio-driven 3D facial animation aims to synthesize realistic and temporally coherent motions from speech. Despite notable progress in lip synchronization, weakly correlated dynamics, including eyebrow movements, eye blinks, and head motion, which are essential to photorealistic facial animation, remain difficult to model faithfully and often appear static or unnaturally repetitive. We attribute this limitation to three factors: (a) insufficient conditioning for weakly correlated dynamics; (b) the limited ability of deterministic regression to capture diverse motion patterns; (c) data bottlenecks from unreliable upper-face pseudo-labels and limited dataset diversity. To address these issues, we propose SubtleTalk, a framework for generating natural and controllable weakly correlated facial dynamics via multi-condition modeling and residual flow matching. First, to compensate for the limited guidance of speech alone, we introduce interpretable controls, including prosody, regional intensity, and Valence-Arousal signals, to explicitly capture the timing, magnitude, and affective variation of weakly correlated dynamics. Second, to overcome the limited expressiveness of deterministic regression, we build residual flow matching based on a stable speech-driven motion prior, allowing the model to capture stochastic deviations beyond deterministic prediction. Third, to alleviate the data bottleneck, we construct SubtleTalk-Face, a large-scale 3D facial animation dataset comprising about 3,900 identities and 74 hours of data, built via a simple and scalable pseudo-labeling pipeline and featuring improved upper-face tracking and frame-level VA annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the realism and diversity of weakly correlated facial dynamics while preserving accurate lip synchronization.

2026-08-03T11:28:19Z Chenyang Ding Shuai Tan Qunfen Lin Xinwei Jiang Zijiao Zeng Ye Pan 10.1145/3767308.3834962 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00663v2 2026-08-29T15:42:11Z

Audio-driven emotional talking face generation aims to synthesize realistic videos with expressive facial dynamics. However, existing methods struggle to balance controllability and visual fidelity. Although implicit representations capture rich semantics, they lack structural guidance, often resulting in averaged emotional expressions. In contrast, explicit geometric methods offer better control over facial expressions but tend to sacrifice high-frequency texture details. To address it, we propose GemTalk, a diffusion-based framework that combines the semantic richness of implicit representations with the structural precision of explicit geometric priors. We introduce a Vision-guided Audio Emotion Projection (V-AEP) module to extract implicit emotional lip and expression features. At the same time, a Diffusion-based Geometric Priors Generator (D-GPG) generates identity-aware blendshape coefficients as explicit structural priors. Crucially, our Geometry-guided Emotion Modulation (GEM) module leverages these geometric priors to recalibrate the magnitude of implicit features, enabling precise, continuous control over emotional expressions, especially emotion intensity, without sacrificing visual quality. Extensive experiments show GemTalk achieves superior performance in photo-realism, and facial emotional dynamics.

2026-08-01T13:33:38Z 17 pages, 11 figures, accepted by ACMMM 2026 Chenggong Hu Shaoyin Ma Yi Wang Li Sun Mingli Song Jie Song http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23840v1 2026-07-26T20:53:41Z

Facial movement and expression are central to face-to-face communication, conveying turn-taking, attention, agreement, and engagement alongside speech. While speech-driven facial animation has made strong progress in lip synchronization and audio-conditioned motion generation, most methods treat conversational behavior as an emergent byproduct of audio, or expose only coarse sequence-level affect control. As a result, key non-verbal channels such as gaze contact and aversion, rhythmic head motion, and emotion remain difficult to explicitly control. We present STEER, a controllable 3D dyadic motion prior for reactive conversational head avatars. STEER factorizes conversational behavior into explicit controls for gaze, head rhythm, and emotion, allowing users to steer how an avatar listens, reacts, and engages with a conversation partner. Since temporally aligned annotations for these behaviors are not available in public dyadic corpora, we introduce a tracking and annotation pipeline that recovers behavioral pseudo-labels from in-the-wild dyadic video. A causal flow-matching transformer then learns partner-aware target motion conditioned on audio, partner motion, emotion and the proposed behavioral controls. We further embed STEER in a photorealistic avatar pipeline by extending a Universal Gaussian Head-Avatar Prior with a learned mapping from tracked parametric motion into its avatar-driving space. This enables controllable animation of high-fidelity Gaussian head avatars without re-training the underlying avatar model. STEER outperforms recent dyadic motion baselines on motion quality, dynamics, and diversity, remains competitive on partner coupling, and enables gaze, head-rhythm, and emotion edits together with an interactive live deployment. We make our code and dataset annotations available at our webpage.

2026-07-26T20:53:41Z Project page: https://kartik-teotia.github.io/STEER/ Kartik Teotia Helge Rhodin Hyeongwoo Kim Marc Habermann Christian Theobalt http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23657v1 2026-07-26T13:46:04Z

Articulated portrait mesh estimation is fundamental to 3D understanding, avatar generation, and immersive interaction. Existing approaches primarily rely on 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs). However, face-centric models suffer from the "floating head" assumption, conflating head pose with global rotation due to the lack of neck kinematics. Conversely, body-centric models lack high-fidelity facial expression capabilities. Furthermore, current methods struggle to disentangle jaw articulation from expression blendshapes, often over-relying on expressions for mouth opening. These limitations make monocular portrait recovery difficult across representation, supervision, and anatomical parameter estimation. To address these limitations, we introduce GRAPE(Graduated Routing for Articulated Portrait mesh Estimation). We build a Portrait Parametric Model (PPM) with an explicit torso-to-head kinematic chain and a canonical injection step to merge FLAME and the SMPL-X torso. We propose a Progressive Anatomical Alignment (PAA) network, which is composed of a pretrained portrait encoder, a Graduated-Mask Router, and coarse-to-fine experts that follow the portrait anatomical prior. We then train this network with multi-source supervision that combines sparse anatomical keypoints, feature distillation, foreground mask constraints, and relative geometry constraints. Experiments show that GRAPE improves portrait mesh recovery quality, pose alignment, and jaw--expression disentanglement over prior methods. We also demonstrate that our method can benefit the downstream tasks of audio-driven talking-head generation and 3D portrait generation.

2026-07-26T13:46:04Z Yunfei Liu Lijian Lin Ye Zhu Yu Li http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22118v1 2026-07-24T09:12:19Z

Interactive virtual patients driven by large language models (LLMs) offer scalable solutions for medical communication training, such as breaking bad news. However, designing their emotional expressiveness remains a challenge. This paper presents an AI-driven virtual patient framework combining LLM dialogue with real-time facial animation in virtual reality (VR). We conducted an exploratory, formative evaluation with seven medical experts to gather early feedback and elicit design requirements. The evaluation focused on how variations in facial expression intensity affect perceived realism and the virtual patient's emotion intelligibility. While descriptive quantitative ratings remained baseline across conditions, qualitative interviews provided deep insights into how experts perceive virtual emotional cues. The findings suggest that experts evaluate emotional realism holistically through multiple verbal and non-verbal channels; isolated facial adjustments are easily overshadowed by dialogue nuances and vocal prosody. Based on these insights, we present a roadmap for future medical training simulators, highlighting the need for synchronized, multi-modal pipelines incorporating body gestures, conversational pauses, and vocal dynamics.

2026-07-24T09:12:19Z Steffen Hauck Theresa Schell Sophie Jörg Jens Grubert http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16760v2 2026-07-22T16:39:20Z

Driver monitoring systems (DMS) increasingly rely on facial cues to infer drowsiness, distraction, and cognitive load in real time. Facial Action Units (AUs), grounded in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), provide an objective and interpretable representation of such states, but their automatic detection in the driving context is complicated by low and variable illumination, partial occlusion, head-pose variation, and the subtlety and short duration of relevant AU activations. Existing AU detectors largely treat spatial appearance and temporal dynamics separately, limiting their ability to exploit self-supervisory signal from abundant unlabeled driving video. We propose the Twin Cycle Autoencoder (TCA), a spatiotemporal architecture composed of two coupled cycle-consistent autoencoder branches: a Spatial Cycle Autoencoder that disentangles AU-relevant appearance from identity through image-level cycle consistency, and a Temporal Cycle Autoencoder that enforces forward-backward consistency over latent AU trajectories to capture onset-apex-offset dynamics. The two branches are coupled through a cross-branch latent alignment loss and fused via an attention module before multi-label AU classification. We evaluate TCA on the DISFA and BP4D benchmarks and on an in-cabin naturalistic driving dataset, and observe consistent improvements over CNN-RNN, 3D-CNN, and graph-based AU baselines, particularly for low-intensity and rapidly transitioning AUs relevant to fatigue (AU45, AU43) and yawning (AU26). We further show the model sustains real-time throughput on an embedded Jetson Xavier NX platform, supporting its use in production-grade advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

2026-07-18T10:52:08Z Sai Sidharth D http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12206v1 2026-07-13T23:16:29Z

We present RegHead, a framework for constructing semantic blendshape sets for animatable non-humanoid head avatars. With a fixed expression vocabulary, semantic blendshapes provide a low-dimensional and interpretable animation interface and support cross-identity retargeting. Building such blendshape sets remains expensive because (i) expression-consistent supervision is scarce, (ii) generated 4D assets typically lack correspondence, and (iii) facial motion is highly localized. We propose (1) a large-scale dataset of non-humanoid identities paired with a shared expression vocabulary, obtained by expanding a small artist-rigged library via fine-tuned image editing; (2) a dense stochastic anchor motion representation tailored to localized facial deformations; and (3) a fast feed-forward registration model that converts unregistered expression meshes into a corresponded blendshape basis by predicting anchor-based deformations from the neutral shape. Experiments show that our approach produces higher-fidelity expression meshes than baselines, while running orders of magnitude faster than optimization. We further demonstrate real-time retargeting from human face tracking signals to non-humanoid characters, capturing both head pose and localized facial motions. Our project page is available at https://snap-research.github.io/RegHead/.

2026-07-13T23:16:29Z Jiahao Luo Hao Zhang Jianqi Chen Yijie He Jiaxu Zou Michael Vasilkovsky Sergei Korolev Sergey Tulyakov Chaoyang Wang Peter Wonka James Davis Jian Wang http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02912v1 2026-07-03T03:18:02Z

Despite the high accuracy of EEG-based emotion recognition, existing models remain opaque "black boxes", lacking semantic grounding between abstract neural features and human-interpretable states. In this paper, we reframe EEG explainability as a cross-modal generation task, shifting the paradigm from feature attribution to behavioral visualization. We introduce Facial Emoji Proxy Modeling, a novel framework that translates high-dimensional EEG signals into identity-anonymized facial emojis. Guided by the neuroscientific inspiration of neural-facial association, this approach grounds neural representations in the manifold of observable facial dynamics. Technically, our framework integrates FMENet, a specialized backbone modeling expression-relevant spatial synergies, and the Facial Emoji Learning Branch (FELB), which treats emoji reconstruction as a structured semantic regularizer. Extensive experiments on EAV and MMER benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among EEG-only models. Crucially, it generates semantically faithful facial animations that provide a transparent, privacy-preserving window into the brain's emotional evolution, effectively allowing users to "see the emotion" directly from neural signals. Code is available at https://github.com/xian-sh/SeeEmotion

2026-07-03T03:18:02Z Accepted by ICML 2026 Jingjing Hu Guo Dan Haofan Cheng Ying Zeng Zhan Si Jinxing Zhou Meng Wang http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31249v1 2026-06-30T07:25:13Z

In this paper, we present the solution developed by our team, XInsight Lab, which achieved first place in Track 3 of the 4th EI-MIGA-IJCAI Challenge with a test accuracy of 0.76923. To address the challenge of weak and sparse implicit emotion evidence in long videos, this paper extends the winning solution from the previous competition and proposes a compact multi-modal temporal modeling framework. The framework integrates and evaluates the effects of multi-source features, including 2D/3D skeletons, facial expression Blendshapes, DINOv2/v3 vision foundation models, X-CLIP video features, and Gemini semantic priors. Architecturally, we propose a cross-attention mechanism that utilizes static pose features, denoted as Base, as the Query and dynamic micro-motion differential features, denoted as Offset, as the Key and Value. By capturing local relative velocities, this mechanism eliminates static biases related to individual body shape and identity. Concurrently, an adaptive pooling method based on Multiple Instance Learning is employed to extract instantaneous emotions while suppressing background noise in long sequences. Finally, the paper reveals the representation collapse phenomenon of general vision foundation models in micro-dynamic tasks, and analyzes the underlying mechanisms where networks fall into public-leaderboard-driven pseudo-generalization due to shortcut learning and rote memorization.

2026-06-30T07:25:13Z Xiaochuan Guo Jihao Gu Haixu Liu Yuxin Liu Qi Wang Yufei Wang Fei Wang Kun Li Dan Guo http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28568v1 2026-06-26T19:48:44Z

Speech-driven 3D facial animation methods face significant challenges in simultaneously achieving high-fidelity motion and precise artistic control at production quality. Existing controllable models typically learn global style control by relying on large-scale, low-quality \emph{in-the-wild} datasets that compromise overall animation realism. Furthermore, these frameworks often lack the fine-grained temporal precision required for demanding tasks such as dialogue localization (e.g., dubbing), where matching specific facial expressions is as critical as lip synchronization. We present KM-Speaker (Keypoint-Matching Speaker), a novel keypoint-conditioned flow-based generative framework that provides both global style guidance and frame-level temporal control from reference performances. We propose a disentanglement strategy that separates audio-driven lip motion from keypoint-driven upper-face dynamics, together with a global style context preservation mechanism to ensure coherent full-face expressiveness. KM-Speaker advances example-based 3D facial animation by achieving high-fidelity motion and flexible controllability in a data-constrained setting, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods in lip-sync accuracy, style adherence, and expressive temporal control.

2026-06-26T19:48:44Z 20 pages, 14 figures Arthur Josi Emeline Got Abdallah Dib Luiz Gustavo Hafemann Rafael M. O. Cruz http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27779v1 2026-06-26T07:11:10Z

Generating lifelike facial animation for dyadic conversations requires reconciling high-level cognitive intent with precise low-level motor reflexes, yet existing methods fall short in the semantic understanding of dialogue context and in precise dynamic control. In this paper, we propose MindFlow, a dual-pathway generative framework inspired by the Ventral-Dorsal pathway model in neuroscience, which decouples generation into two collaborative streams, thereby harmonizing deep semantic reasoning with fine-grained control. In the Ventral module, we transform the conventional Sentence-Action approach into a novel Chunk-State approach that models raw acoustic streams as a context-aware, evolving emotional state chain, capturing subtle paralinguistic nuances and mid-utterance emotional shifts missed by sentence-level modeling. The Dorsal module features a conditional autoregressive flow matching network for high-fidelity facial motion, driven by high-frequency acoustic cues and modulated by emotion states, plus a Selective Acoustic Injector for adaptive audio gating to ensure robustness in talking-and-listening dynamics without interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MindFlow achieves superior semantic appropriateness and motion naturalness compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

2026-06-26T07:11:10Z Accepted by ECCV 2026 Hejia Chen Haoxian Zhang Xu He Xiaoqiang Liu Pengfei Wan Shoulong Zhang Shuai Li