English

AvatarForcing: One-Step Streaming Talking Avatars via Local-Future Sliding-Window Denoising

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-19 v2

Abstract

Real-time talking avatar generation requires low latency and minute-level temporal stability. Autoregressive (AR) forcing enables streaming inference but suffers from exposure bias, which causes errors to accumulate and become irreversible over long rollouts. In contrast, full-sequence diffusion transformers mitigate drift but remain computationally prohibitive for real-time long-form synthesis. We present AvatarForcing, a one-step streaming diffusion framework that denoises a fixed local-future window with heterogeneous noise levels and emits one clean block per step under constant per-step cost. To stabilize unbounded streams, the method introduces dual-anchor temporal forcing: a style anchor that re-indexes RoPE to maintain a fixed relative position with respect to the active window and applies anchor-audio zero-padding, and a temporal anchor that reuses recently emitted clean blocks to ensure smooth transitions. Real-time one-step inference is enabled by two-stage streaming distillation with offline ODE backfill and distribution matching. Experiments on standard benchmarks and a new 400-video long-form benchmark show strong visual quality and lip synchronization at 34 ms/frame using a 1.3B-parameter student model for realtime streaming. Our page is available at: https://cuiliyuan121.github.io/AvatarForcing/

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.14331,
  title  = {AvatarForcing: One-Step Streaming Talking Avatars via Local-Future Sliding-Window Denoising},
  author = {Liyuan Cui and Wentao Hu and Wenyuan Zhang and Zesong Yang and Fan Shi and Xiaoqiang Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14331},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:20:39.671Z