A Bridge from Audio to Video: Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Allows Every Face to Speak Multiple Languages

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Su, Zibo, Wei, Kun, Li, Jiahua, Yang, Xu, Deng, Cheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Su, Zibo
Wei, Kun
Li, Jiahua
Yang, Xu
Deng, Cheng
author_facet Su, Zibo
Wei, Kun
Li, Jiahua
Yang, Xu
Deng, Cheng
contents Speech-driven talking face synthesis (TFS) focuses on generating lifelike facial animations from audio input. Current TFS models perform well in English but unsatisfactorily in non-English languages, producing wrong mouth shapes and rigid facial expressions. The terrible performance is caused by the English-dominated training datasets and the lack of cross-language generalization abilities. Thus, we propose Multilingual Experts (MuEx), a novel framework featuring a Phoneme-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (PG-MoE) architecture that employs phonemes and visemes as universal intermediaries to bridge audio and video modalities, achieving lifelike multilingual TFS. To alleviate the influence of linguistic differences and dataset bias, we extract audio and video features as phonemes and visemes respectively, which are the basic units of speech sounds and mouth movements. To address audiovisual synchronization issues, we introduce the Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Mechanism (PV-Align), which establishes robust cross-modal correspondences between phonemes and visemes. In addition, we build a Multilingual Talking Face Benchmark (MTFB) comprising 12 diverse languages with 95.04 hours of high-quality videos for training and evaluating multilingual TFS performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuEx achieves superior performance across all languages in MTFB and exhibits effective zero-shot generalization to unseen languages without additional training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Bridge from Audio to Video: Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Allows Every Face to Speak Multiple Languages
Su, Zibo
Wei, Kun
Li, Jiahua
Yang, Xu
Deng, Cheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Speech-driven talking face synthesis (TFS) focuses on generating lifelike facial animations from audio input. Current TFS models perform well in English but unsatisfactorily in non-English languages, producing wrong mouth shapes and rigid facial expressions. The terrible performance is caused by the English-dominated training datasets and the lack of cross-language generalization abilities. Thus, we propose Multilingual Experts (MuEx), a novel framework featuring a Phoneme-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (PG-MoE) architecture that employs phonemes and visemes as universal intermediaries to bridge audio and video modalities, achieving lifelike multilingual TFS. To alleviate the influence of linguistic differences and dataset bias, we extract audio and video features as phonemes and visemes respectively, which are the basic units of speech sounds and mouth movements. To address audiovisual synchronization issues, we introduce the Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Mechanism (PV-Align), which establishes robust cross-modal correspondences between phonemes and visemes. In addition, we build a Multilingual Talking Face Benchmark (MTFB) comprising 12 diverse languages with 95.04 hours of high-quality videos for training and evaluating multilingual TFS performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuEx achieves superior performance across all languages in MTFB and exhibits effective zero-shot generalization to unseen languages without additional training.
title A Bridge from Audio to Video: Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Allows Every Face to Speak Multiple Languages
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06612