# KeyframeFace: Language-Driven Facial Animation via Semantic Keyframes Source: [KeyframeFace: Language-Driven Facial Animation via Semantic Keyframes]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-05-14T05:00:05.130Z Authors: Jingchao Wu, Zejian Kang, Haibo Liu, Yuanchen Fei, Xiangru Huang Published: 2025-12-12T06:45:02.000Z ## Abstract Facial animation is a core component for creating digital characters in Computer Graphics (CG) industry. A typical production workflow relies on sparse, semantically meaningful keyframes to precisely control facial expressions. Enabling such animation directly from natural-language descriptions could significantly improve content creation efficiency and accessibility. However, most existing methods adopt a text-to-continuous-frames paradigm, directly regressing dense facial motion trajectories from language. This formulation entangles high-level semantic intent with low-level motion, lacks explicit semantic control structure, and limits precise editing and interpretability. Inspired by the keyframe paradigm in animation production, we propose KeyframeFace, a framework for semantic facial animation from language via interpretable keyframes. Instead of predicting dense motion trajectories, our method represents animation as a sequence of semantically meaningful keyframes in an interpretable ARKit-based facial control space. A language-driven model leverages large language model (LLM) priors to generate keyframes that align with contextual text descriptions and emotion cues. To support this formulation, we construct a multimodal dataset comprising 2,100 expression scripts paired with monocular videos, per-frame ARKit coefficients, and manually annotated semantic keyframes. Experiments show that incorporating semantic keyframe supervision and language priors significantly improves expression fidelity and semantic alignment compared to methods that do not use facial action semantics. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Text-to-Motion Generation on KeyframeFace (test)](): Text-to-motion generation; KeyframeFace (test); FID: 0.0599. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()