ALIVE: An Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine with Content-Aware Retrieval for Real-Time Interaction

TL;DR

ALIVE is a local, real-time interactive video engine that enhances passive lecture viewing by integrating content-aware retrieval, avatar-delivered explanations, and multimodal student interaction, all operating fully on local hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, privacy-preserving system combining neural avatars, content-aware retrieval, and multimodal interaction for real-time lecture engagement.

Findings

Demonstrates accurate retrieval and low latency in a medical imaging course

Provides engaging, grounded explanations via avatar responses

Operates fully on local hardware, ensuring privacy and responsiveness

Abstract

Traditional lecture videos offer flexibility but lack mechanisms for real-time clarification, forcing learners to search externally when confusion arises. Recent advances in large language models and neural avatars provide new opportunities for interactive learning, yet existing systems typically lack lecture awareness, rely on cloud-based services, or fail to integrate retrieval and avatar-delivered explanations in a unified, privacy-preserving pipeline. We present ALIVE, an Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine that transforms passive lecture viewing into a dynamic, real-time learning experience. ALIVE operates fully on local hardware and integrates (1) Avatar-delivered lecture generated through ASR transcription, LLM refinement, and neural talking-head synthesis; (2) A content-aware retrieval mechanism that combines semantic similarity with timestamp alignment to surface contextually relevant lecture segments; and (3) Real-time multimodal interaction, enabling students to pause the lecture, ask questions through text or voice, and receive grounded explanations either as text or as avatar-delivered responses. To maintain responsiveness, ALIVE employs lightweight embedding models, FAISS-based retrieval, and segmented avatar synthesis with progressive preloading. We demonstrate the system on a complete medical imaging course, evaluate its retrieval accuracy, latency characteristics, and user experience, and show that ALIVE provides accurate, content-aware, and engaging real-time support. ALIVE illustrates how multimodal AI-when combined with content-aware retrieval and local deployment-can significantly enhance the pedagogical value of recorded lectures, offering an extensible pathway toward next-generation interactive learning environments.