Playmate: Flexible Control of Portrait Animation via 3D-Implicit Space Guided Diffusion

Abstract: Recent diffusion-based talking face generation models have demonstrated impressive potential in synthesizing videos that accurately match a speech audio clip with a given reference identity. However, existing approaches still encounter significant challenges due to uncontrollable factors, such as inaccurate lip-sync, inappropriate head posture and the lack of fine-grained control over facial expressions. In order to introduce more face-guided conditions beyond speech audio clips, a novel two-stage training framework Playmate is proposed to generate more lifelike facial expressions and talking faces. In the first stage, we introduce a decoupled implicit 3D representation along with a meticulously designed motion-decoupled module to facilitate more accurate attribute disentanglement and generate expressive talking videos directly from audio cues. Then, in the second stage, we introduce an emotion-control module to encode emotion control information into the latent space, enabling fine-grained control over emotions and thereby achieving the ability to generate talking videos with desired emotion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Playmate not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of video quality, but also exhibits strong competitiveness in lip synchronization while offering improved flexibility in controlling emotion and head pose. The code will be available at https://github.com/Playmate111/Playmate.