GaussianEmoTalker: Real-Time Emotional Talking Head Synthesis with Audio-Driven and Blendshape-Based 3D Gaussian Splatting

Audio-driven talking head synthesis has achieved impressive progress in lip synchronization and visual quality, yet generating expressive emotional avatars with controllable intensity remains challenging, especially under real-time constraints. In this paper, we present GaussianEmoTalker, an audio-driven framework for real-time emotional talking head synthesis based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Instead of directly predicting the final emotional avatar from speech, we formulate emotional animation as a neutral-to-emotional residual deformation problem. GaussianEmoTalker first constructs an identit