English

SyncLipMAE: Contrastive Masked Pretraining for Audio-Visual Talking-Face Representation

Artificial Intelligence 2026-01-07 v2 Multimedia

Abstract

We introduce SyncLipMAE, a self-supervised pretraining framework for talking-face video that learns synchronization-aware and transferable facial dynamics from unlabeled audio-visual streams. Our approach couples masked visual modeling with cross-modal contrastive alignment and employs three per-frame prompt tokens that explicitly encode the essential factors of a talking-face frame - identity, vocal motion (speech-synchronized facial dynamics), and ambient motion (audio-agnostic movements such as blinks and head pose). The contrastive objective uses time-aligned vocal-motion and audio tokens as positives and misaligned pairs as negatives, driving both modalities into a shared embedding space and yielding token-level audio-visual stream synchronization. After pretraining, the aligned audio tokens together with the visual prompt tokens (identity, vocal motion, ambient motion) form a unified interface for four disparate downstream settings: (i) audio-visual stream synchronization; (ii) facial emotion and head/face action recognition; (iii) visual speech recognition; and (iv) visual dubbing, for which we enable indistinguishable audio- or video-driven control within a single model. Across four task families that require distinct capabilities, SyncLipMAE achieves state-of-the-art results, underscoring the effectiveness of synchronization-aware, factorized self-supervised pretraining.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.10069,
  title  = {SyncLipMAE: Contrastive Masked Pretraining for Audio-Visual Talking-Face Representation},
  author = {Zeyu Ling and Xiaodong Gu and Jiangnan Tang and Changqing Zou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10069},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:31:02.157Z