Paper Detail

Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching: Real-Time One-Shot Emotion-Controllable Portrait Animation

Haijie Yang, Jindi Bao, Yixuan Dong, Hongliang Zhang, Jian Bi, Hao Tang, Zhenyu Zhang, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang

arxiv Score 4.8

Published 2026-08-03 · First seen 2026-08-04

General AI

Abstract

Audio-driven portrait animation has advanced rapidly with diffusion-based generative models, yet real-time one-shot generation with expressive emotion control remains challenging. Existing methods often suffer from insufficient emotion-aware motion priors and expensive appearance computation during multi-step denoising. To address these issues, we propose Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching, a cascaded framework for real-time one-shot emotion-controllable portrait animation. Instead of directly generating the target portrait from audio, our method uses a Gaussian-based emotion proxy avatar as a reusable motion generator, which is trained once on a single identity to produce expressive driving videos from audio and emotion labels. Since the proxy avatar only provides motion rather than target appearance or geometry, a large-scale one-shot retargeting model further extracts identity-independent motion from the proxy performance and adapts it to arbitrary target portraits. To improve inference efficiency, we introduce zero-shot appearance reuse with low-rank caching, which caches reference appearance features at the initial denoising step and models subsequent feature variations using lightweight low-rank adapters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves stronger emotional expressiveness, better identity-preserving animation, and substantially reduced inference cost, enabling real-time one-shot portrait animation.

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BibTeX

@article{yang2026proxy,
  title = {Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching: Real-Time One-Shot Emotion-Controllable Portrait Animation},
  author = {Haijie Yang and Jindi Bao and Yixuan Dong and Hongliang Zhang and Jian Bi and Hao Tang and Zhenyu Zhang and Jianjun Qian and Jian Yang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Audio-driven portrait animation has advanced rapidly with diffusion-based generative models, yet real-time one-shot generation with expressive emotion control remains challenging. Existing methods often suffer from insufficient emotion-aware motion priors and expensive appearance computation during multi-step denoising. To address these issues, we propose Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching, a cascaded framework for real-time one-shot emotion-controllable portrait animation. Instead of directly },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01978},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2608.01978},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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