  Talking face generation aims to synthesize a sequence of face images that
correspond to a clip of speech. This is a challenging task because face
appearance variation and semantics of speech are coupled together in the subtle
movements of the talking face regions. Existing works either construct specific
face appearance model on specific subjects or model the transformation between
lip motion and speech. In this work, we integrate both aspects and enable
arbitrary-subject talking face generation by learning disentangled audio-visual
representation. We find that the talking face sequence is actually a
composition of both subject-related information and speech-related information.
These two spaces are then explicitly disentangled through a novel
associative-and-adversarial training process. This disentangled representation
has an advantage where both audio and video can serve as inputs for generation.
Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach generates realistic
talking face sequences on arbitrary subjects with much clearer lip motion
patterns than previous work. We also demonstrate the learned audio-visual
representation is extremely useful for the tasks of automatic lip reading and
audio-video retrieval.
