REA-Listener: Real-Time Listening Head Generation with Dynamic Emotion Modeling and Flexible Modality Adaptation

Listening head generation aims to synthesize realistic and responsive non-verbal listener head motions that respond to speakers in conversational scenarios. Existing methods typically rely on fixed audio-visual input modalities and predefined emotion labels, limiting their adaptability and expressiveness in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time framework, REA-Listener, to generate high-fidelity listening head videos with flexible modality adaptation and dynamic emotion modeling. Specifically, we first propose a Modality-Adaptive Mixture of Experts (MA-MoE) module to encode arbitrary combinations of speaker audio and visual signals into a unified embedding space, ensuring robustness under partial modality conditions. To further enhance the temporal consistency of listener emotion, we present a lightweight emotional head dynamics generator with a multi-modal emotion predictor, which infers listener emotions dynamically from speaker context alongside head motion coefficient prediction. Finally, we employ a 3D-aware renderer based on 3D Gaussian Splatting to produce high-quality listener head videos in real time. With these components, our approach achieves efficient head motion generation at 30fps on a single NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU, supporting real-time interaction. Extensive evaluations and applications demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in listening head generation.