VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis
Authors: name: Enric Corona, name: Andrei Zanfir, name: Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, name: Nikos Kolotouros, name: Thiemo Alldieck, name: Cristian Sminchisescu

We propose VLOGGER, a method for audio-driven human video generation from a
single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent
generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic
human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion-based architecture
that augments text-to-image models with both spatial and temporal controls.
This supports the generation of high quality video of variable length, easily
controllable through high-level representations of human faces and bodies. In
contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each
person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete
image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of
scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical
to correctly synthesize humans who communicate. We also curate MENTOR, a new
and diverse dataset with 3d pose and expression annotations, one order of
magnitude larger than previous ones (800,000 identities) and with dynamic
gestures, on which we train and ablate our main technical contributions.
  VLOGGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in three public benchmarks,
considering image quality, identity preservation and temporal consistency while
also generating upper-body gestures. We analyze the performance of VLOGGER with
respect to multiple diversity metrics, showing that our architectural choices
and the use of MENTOR benefit training a fair and unbiased model at scale.
Finally we show applications in video editing and personalization.