Editable Emotional Talking-Head Synthesis Through Geometry-Aware Diffusion Over Dynamic Gaussian Representations

Authors

  • Ye-Jin Park Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Republic of Korea
  • Seo-Hyun Song School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
  • Tae-Hyun Bae School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Keywords:

Talking-Head Synthesis, Diffusion Models, Gaussian Splatting, Emotion Editing, Facial Animation

Abstract

The synthesis of highly realistic and emotionally controllable talking-head videos remains a formidable challenge in computer vision and computer graphics. Existing frameworks predominantly rely on generative adversarial networks or implicit neural representations, which often suffer from either a lack of three-dimensional geometric consistency or prohibitive computational costs during rendering. Furthermore, infusing precise emotional states into synchronized lip movements without disrupting the underlying anatomical constraints poses an ongoing theoretical and practical dilemma. To address these multifaceted challenges, this paper presents a novel framework for editable emotional talking-head synthesis that leverages geometry-aware diffusion models operating over dynamic three-dimensional Gaussian representations. By representing the human head through an ensemble of explicit, trackable, and dynamically updatable Gaussian splats, the proposed architecture achieves unparalleled rendering efficiency and multi-view consistency. The core innovation lies in the geometry-aware diffusion mechanism, which learns to model the complex temporal dynamics of facial deformations and emotional micro-expressions in the parameter space of the Gaussian attributes. This allows for fine-grained editing of emotional states in a continuous latent space while preserving strict lip-sync fidelity. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques across standard quantitative metrics, including visual quality, lip-sync accuracy, and emotional expressiveness. The explicit nature of the Gaussian representation also facilitates real-time inference and user-directed spatial editing.

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Published

2026-09-11