TurboTalk: Progressive Distillation for One-Step Audio-Driven Talking Avatar Generation

arXiv cs.CV / 4/17/2026

📰 NewsSignals & Early TrendsIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper introduces TurboTalk, a progressive distillation framework designed to convert a multi-step audio-driven talking-avatar diffusion model into a single-step generator.
  • It uses a two-stage approach: first applying Distribution Matching Distillation to train a stable 4-step “student,” then using adversarial distillation to progressively reduce denoising steps from 4 down to 1.
  • To prevent training instability during extreme step reduction, TurboTalk adds progressive timestep sampling and a self-compare adversarial objective that stabilizes the distillation process.
  • Experiments report single-step video generation with a claimed 120× inference speedup while maintaining high generation quality.
  • The work targets practical deployment constraints by substantially reducing computational overhead inherent in multi-step denoising pipelines.

Abstract

Existing audio-driven video digital human generation models rely on multi-step denoising, resulting in substantial computational overhead that severely limits their deployment in real-world settings. While one-step distillation approaches can significantly accelerate inference, they often suffer from training instability. To address this challenge, we propose TurboTalk, a two-stage progressive distillation framework that effectively compresses a multi-step audio-driven video diffusion model into a single-step generator. We first adopt Distribution Matching Distillation to obtain a strong and stable 4-step student, and then progressively reduce the denoising steps from 4 to 1 through adversarial distillation. To ensure stable training under extreme step reduction, we introduce a progressive timestep sampling strategy and a self-compare adversarial objective that provides an intermediate adversarial reference that stabilizes progressive distillation. Our method achieve single-step generation of video talking avatar, boosting inference speed by 120 times while maintaining high generation quality.