TalkingMachines: Real-Time Audio-Driven FaceTime-Style Video via Autoregressive Diffusion Models

Low Qi Hong Chetwin, Weimin Wang

TalkingMachines: Real-Time Audio-Driven FaceTime-Style Video via Autoregressive Diffusion Models: 20 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #20 of 50 papers on 2025-06-05. Day-by-day upvote history.

In this paper, we present TalkingMachines -- an efficient framework that transforms pretrained video generation models into real-time, audio-driven character animators. TalkingMachines enables natural conversational experiences by integrating an audio large language model (LLM) with our video generation foundation model. Our primary contributions include: (1) We adapt a pretrained SOTA image-to-video DiT into an audio-driven avatar generation model of 18 billion parameters; (2) We enable infinite video streaming without error accumulation through asymmetric knowledge distillation from a bidirectional teacher model into a sparse causal, autoregressive student model; (3) We design a high-throughput, low-latency inference pipeline incorporating several key engineering optimizations such as: (a) disaggregation of the DiT and VAE decoder across separate devices, (b) efficient overlap of inter-device communication and computation using CUDA streams, (c) elimination of redundant recomputations to maximize frame-generation throughput. Please see demo videos here - https://aaxwaz.github.io/TalkingMachines/

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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