AnyTalk: Speech Animation for Arbitrary Characters Leveraging a Video Generation Model

Kwan Yun, Serin Yoon, Sunjin Jung, Jung Eun Yoo, Inyup Lee, Junyong Noh

AnyTalk: Speech Animation for Arbitrary Characters Leveraging a Video Generation Model: 12 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #24 of 42 papers on 2026-08-18. Day-by-day upvote history.

We present AnyTalk, a novel method for generating 3D speech animations for arbitrary characters without requiring any animation data. While existing audio-driven 3D speech animation methods rely on character-specific training data or laborious rigging/re-meshing, AnyTalk circumvents these limitations by leveraging recent video diffusion models trained on extensive video datasets. We first adapt a pre-trained video diffusion model to a target character through our Character-specific Fine-tuning (CsF) technique. By fine-tuning on rendered images of the 3D character paired with zeroed-out audio embeddings (representing "no motion"), we eliminate the need for animation data while preserving the motion prior of large-scale video diffusion model. We then uplift the resulting talking-head video into a 3D speech animation by estimating blendshape parameters through a proposed optimization process. AnyTalk enables lip-synced animations across diverse face meshes and blendshape configurations, significantly reducing manual effort and data requirements. We further enhance usability by distilling AnyTalk into a streamlined network, AnyTalk_{RT}, thereby enabling real-time performance. By leveraging talking-head video generation, our method broadens access to audio-driven speech animation technology for arbitrary characters. The code is publicly available at https://serin-yoon.github.io/projects/anytalk/.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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