In plain words: Animates a still portrait photo to follow a person's face and head movements in a live video, using fewer cleanup steps and tiny video chunks with a saved keyframe for stable long streams. It runs 7 to 22 times faster than earlier photo-animation tools.
Abstract · PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streaming
Current diffusion-based portrait animation models predominantly focus on enhancing visual quality and expression realism, while overlooking generation latency and real-time performance, which restricts their application range in the live streaming scenario. We propose PersonaLive, a novel diffusion-based framework towards streaming real-time portrait animation with multi-stage training recipes. Specifically, we first adopt hybrid implicit signals, namely implicit facial representations and 3D implicit keypoints, to achieve expressive image-level motion control. Then, a fewer-step appearance distillation strategy is proposed to eliminate appearance redundancy in the denoising process, greatly improving inference efficiency. Finally, we introduce an autoregressive micro-chunk streaming generation paradigm equipped with a sliding training strategy and a historical keyframe mechanism to enable low-latency and stable long-term video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PersonaLive achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to 7-22x speedup over prior diffusion-based portrait animation models.
Zhiyuan Li, Chi-Man Pun, Chen Fang, Jue Wang, Xiaodong Cun
arXiv:2512.11253 · cs.CV · submitted Dec 12, 2025
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