X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02944v1
• Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:57:01 GMT
• Title: X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio
• Authors: Chenxu Zhang, Zenan Li, Hongyi Xu, You Xie, Xiaochen Zhao, Tianpei Gu, Guoxian Song, Xin Chen, Chao Liang, Jianwen Jiang, Linjie Luo,
• Abstract summary: X-Actor generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip.<n>By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics.<n>X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations.
• Score: 27.619816538121327
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting.

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