DiffusionAct: Controllable Diffusion Autoencoder for One-shot Face Reenactment

Stella Bounareli1, Christos Tzelepis2, Vasileios Argyriou1, Ioannis Patras3, Georgios Tzimiropoulos3,
1Kingston Univeristy, London, UK,
2City University of London, UK
3Queen Mary Universtity of London, UK

Published in the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 2025
Paper Code

DiffusionAct is a diffusion-based method, that performs one-shot self and cross-subject neural face reenactment without any subject-specific fine-tuning. We demonstrate that, compared to current state-of-the-art methods, our approach produces realistic, artifact-free images, accurately transfers the target head pose and expression, and faithfully reconstructs the source identity and appearance across challenging conditions, e.g., large head pose movements.

Abstract

Video-driven neural face reenactment aims to synthesize realistic facial images that successfully preserve the identity and appearance of a source face, while transferring the target head pose and facial expressions. Existing GAN-based methods suffer from either distortions and visual artifacts or poor reconstruction quality, i.e., the background and several important appearance details, such as hair style/color, glasses and accessories, are not faithfully reconstructed. Recent advances in Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) enable the generation of high-quality realistic images. To this end, in this paper we present DiffusionAct, a novel method that leverages the photo-realistic image generation of diffusion models to perform neural face reenactment. Specifically, we propose to control the semantic space of a Diffusion Autoencoder (DiffAE), in order to edit the facial pose of the input images, defined as the head pose orientation and the facial expressions. Our method allows one-shot, self, and cross-subject reenactment, without requiring subject-specific fine-tuning. We compare against state-of-the-art GAN-, StyleGAN2-, and diffusion-based methods, showing better or on-par reenactment performance.

Method


We present a method for neural face reenactment based on a pre-trained Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM). Specifically, given a pair of a source ($\mathbf{x}_0^s$) and a target ($\mathbf{x}_0^t$) images, we propose to condition the pre-trained semantic encoder of a Diffusion Autoencoder (DiffAE) model on the target facial landmarks $\mathbf{y}_t$. Our reenactment encoder $\mathcal{E}_r$ learns to to predict the semantic code $\mathbf{z}_r$ that, when decoded by the pre-trained DDIM sampler, generates the reenacted image $\mathbf{x}_0^r$ that captures the source identity/appearance and the target head pose and facial expressions.

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Generated Videos





Comparisons with face reenactment methods



Self Reenactment

Cross-subject Reenactment

BibTeX

 @InProceedings{bounareli2024diffusionact,
        author    = {Bounareli, Stella and Tzelepis, Christos and Argyriou, Vasileios and Patras, Ioannis and Tzimiropoulos, Georgios},
        title     = {DiffusionAct: Controllable Diffusion Autoencoder for One-shot Face Reenactment},
        journal   = {IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition},
        year      = {2025},
    }