MoEE: Mixture of Emotion Experts for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation

Huaize Liu, Wenzhang Sun, Donglin Di, Shibo Sun, Jiahui Yang, Changqing Zou, Hujun Bao; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 26222-26231

The generation of talking avatars has achieved significant advancements in precise audio synchronization. However, crafting lifelike talking head videos requires capturing a broad spectrum of emotions and subtle facial expressions. Current methods face fundamental challenges: a) the absence of frameworks for modeling single basic emotional expressions, which restricts the generation of complex emotions such as compound emotions; b) the lack of comprehensive datasets rich in human emotional expressions, which limits the potential of models. To address these challenges, we propose the following innovations: 1) the Mixture of Emotion Experts (MoEE) model, which decouples six fundamental emotions to enable the precise synthesis of both singular and compound emotional states; 2) the DH-FaceEmoVid-150 dataset, specifically curated to include six prevalent human emotional expressions as well as four types of compound emotions, thereby expanding the training potential of emotion-driven models; 3) an emotion-to-latents module that leverages multimodal inputs, aligning diverse control signals--such as audio, text, and labels--to enhance audio-driven emotion control. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that the MoEE framework, in conjunction with the DH-FaceEmoVid-150 dataset, excels in generating complex emotional expressions and nuanced facial details, setting a new benchmark in the field. These datasets will be publicly released.