SoulX-FlashHead: Oracle-guided Generation of Infinite Real-time Streaming Talking Heads

TL;DR

SoulX-FlashHead is a novel real-time streaming talking head generation framework that balances high visual quality and low latency, utilizing oracle-guided distillation and streaming-aware pre-training for stability and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces SoulX-FlashHead, a unified large-scale model with innovative training and guidance techniques for stable, high-fidelity, real-time streaming talking head synthesis.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on HDTF and VFHQ benchmarks.

Lite variant runs at 96 FPS on NVIDIA RTX 4090.

Effective in maintaining identity and temporal stability in long sequences.

Abstract

Achieving a balance between high-fidelity visual quality and low-latency streaming remains a formidable challenge in audio-driven portrait generation. Existing large-scale models often suffer from prohibitive computational costs, while lightweight alternatives typically compromise on holistic facial representations and temporal stability. In this paper, we propose SoulX-FlashHead, a unified 1.3B-parameter framework designed for real-time, infinite-length, and high-fidelity streaming video generation. To address the instability of audio features in streaming scenarios, we introduce Streaming-Aware Spatiotemporal Pre-training equipped with a Temporal Audio Context Cache mechanism, which ensures robust feature extraction from short audio fragments. Furthermore, to mitigate the error accumulation and identity drift inherent in long-sequence autoregressive generation, we propose Oracle-Guided Bidirectional Distillation, leveraging ground-truth motion priors to provide precise physical guidance. We also present VividHead, a large-scale, high-quality dataset containing 782 hours of strictly aligned footage to support robust training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SoulX-FlashHead achieves state-of-the-art performance on HDTF and VFHQ benchmarks. Notably, our Lite variant achieves an inference speed of 96 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090, facilitating ultra-fast interaction without sacrificing visual coherence.