TalkVid: A Large-Scale Diversified Dataset for Audio-Driven Talking Head Synthesis

Shunian Chen; Hejin Huang; Yexin Liu; Zihan Ye; Pengcheng Chen; Chenghao Zhu; Michael Guan; Rongsheng Wang; Junying Chen; Guanbin Li; Ser-Nam Lim; Harry Yang; Benyou Wang

arXiv · 2508.13618

TalkVid: A Large-Scale Diversified Dataset for Audio-Driven Talking Head Synthesis

Shunian Chen·Hejin Huang·Yexin Liu·Zihan Ye·Pengcheng Chen·Chenghao Zhu·Michael Guan·Rongsheng Wang·Junying Chen·Guanbin Li·Ser-Nam Lim·Harry Yang·Benyou Wang

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Abstract

Audio-driven talking head synthesis has achieved remarkable photorealism, yet state-of-the-art (SOTA) models exhibit a critical failure: they lack generalization to the full spectrum of human diversity in ethnicity, language, and age groups. We argue that this generalization gap is a direct symptom of limitations in existing training data, which lack the necessary scale, quality, and diversity. To address this challenge, we introduce TalkVid, a new large-scale, high-quality, and diverse dataset containing 1244 hours of video from 7729 unique speakers. TalkVid is curated through a principled, multi-stage automated pipeline that rigorously filters for motion stability, aesthetic quality, and facial detail, and is validated against human judgments to ensure its reliability. Furthermore, we construct and release TalkVid-Bench, a stratified evaluation set of 500 clips meticulously balanced across key demographic and linguistic axes. Our experiments demonstrate that a model trained on TalkVid outperforms counterparts trained on previous datasets, exhibiting superior cross-dataset generalization. Crucially, our analysis on TalkVid-Bench reveals performance disparities across subgroups that are obscured by traditional aggregate metrics, underscoring its necessity for future research. Code and data can be found in https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/TalkVid

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BibTeX RIS

Shunian Chen, Hejin Huang, Yexin Liu, Zihan Ye, Pengcheng Chen, Chenghao Zhu, Michael Guan, Rongsheng Wang, Junying Chen, Guanbin Li, Ser-Nam Lim, Harry Yang, Benyou Wang. 2025-08-19. TalkVid: A Large-Scale Diversified Dataset for Audio-Driven Talking Head Synthesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13618

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