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Cong Liang

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

ConsistTalk: Intensity Controllable Temporally Consistent Talking Head Generation with Diffusion Noise Search

  • Zhenjie Liu
  • Jianzhang Lu
  • Renjie Lu
  • Cong Liang
  • Shangfei Wang

Recent advancements in video diffusion models have significantly enhanced audio-driven portrait animation. However, current methods still suffer from flickering, identity drift, and poor audio-visual synchronization. These issues primarily stem from entangled appearance-motion representations and unstable inference strategies. In this paper, we introduce ConsistTalk, a novel intensity-controllable and temporally consistent talking head generation framework with diffusion noise search inference. First, we propose an optical flow-guided temporal module (OFT) that decouples motion features from static appearance by leveraging facial optical flow, thereby reducing visual flicker and improving temporal consistency. Second, we present an Audio-to-Intensity (A2I) model obtained through multimodal teacher-student knowledge distillation. By transforming audio and facial velocity features into a frame-wise intensity sequence, the A2I model enables joint modeling of audio and visual motion, resulting in more natural dynamics. This further enables fine-grained, frame-wise control of motion dynamics while maintaining tight audio-visual synchronization. Third, we introduce a diffusion noise initialization strategy (IC-Init). By enforcing explicit constraints on background coherence and motion continuity during inference-time noise search, we achieve better identity preservation and refine motion dynamics compared to the current autoregressive strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistTalk significantly outperforms prior methods in reducing flicker, preserving identity, and delivering temporally stable, high-fidelity talking head videos.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Fast Inference for Augmented Large Language Models

  • Rana Shahout
  • Cong Liang
  • Shiji Xin
  • Qianru Lao
  • Yong Cui
  • Minlan Yu
  • Michael Mitzenmacher

Augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) enhance standalone LLMs by integrating external data sources through API calls. In interactive applications, efficient scheduling is crucial for maintaining low request completion times, directly impacting user engagement. However, these augmentations introduce new scheduling challenges: the size of augmented requests (in tokens) no longer correlates proportionally with execution time, making traditional size-based scheduling algorithms like Shortest Job First less effective. Additionally, requests may require different handling during API calls, which must be incorporated into scheduling. This paper presents MARS, a novel inference framework that optimizes augmented LLM latency by explicitly incorporating system- and application-level considerations into scheduling. MARS introduces a predictive, memory-aware scheduling approach that integrates API handling and request prioritization to minimize completion time. We implement MARS on top of vLLM and evaluate its performance against baseline LLM inference systems, demonstrating improvements in end-to-end latency by 27%-85% and reductions in TTFT by 4%-96% compared to the existing augmented-LLM system, with even greater gains over vLLM. Our implementation is available online.

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v2026.09.13