Wav2Sem: Plug-and-Play Audio Semantic Decoupling for 3D Speech-Driven Facial Animation

In 3D speech-driven facial animation generation, existing methods commonly employ pre-trained self-supervised audio models as encoders. However, due to the prevalence of phonetically similar syllables with distinct lip shapes in language, these near-homophone syllables tend to exhibit significant coupling in self-supervised audio feature spaces, leading to the averaging effect in subsequent lip motion generation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a plug-and-play semantic decorrelation module—Wav2Sem. This module extracts semantic features corresponding to the entire audio sequence, leveraging the added semantic information to decorrelate audio encodings within the feature space, thereby achieving more expressive audio features. Extensive experiments across multiple Speech-driven models indicate that the Wav2Sem module effectively decouples audio features, significantly alleviating the averaging effect of phonetically similar syllables in lip shape generation, thereby enhancing the precision and naturalness of facial animations. The source code will be publicly available.