StableDub: Taming Diffusion Prior for Generalized and Efficient Visual Dubbing

Liyang Chen, Tianze Zhou, Xu He, Boshi Tang, Zhiyong Wu, Yang Huang, Yang Wu, Zhongqian Sun, Wei Yang, Helen Meng

Published: 2025/9/26

Abstract

The visual dubbing task aims to generate mouth movements synchronized with the driving audio, which has seen significant progress in recent years. However, two critical deficiencies hinder their wide application: (1) Audio-only driving paradigms inadequately capture speaker-specific lip habits, which fail to generate lip movements similar to the target avatar; (2) Conventional blind-inpainting approaches frequently produce visual artifacts when handling obstructions (e.g., microphones, hands), limiting practical deployment. In this paper, we propose StableDub, a novel and concise framework integrating lip-habit-aware modeling with occlusion-robust synthesis. Specifically, building upon the Stable-Diffusion backbone, we develop a lip-habit-modulated mechanism that jointly models phonemic audio-visual synchronization and speaker-specific orofacial dynamics. To achieve plausible lip geometries and object appearances under occlusion, we introduce the occlusion-aware training strategy by explicitly exposing the occlusion objects to the inpainting process. By incorporating the proposed designs, the model eliminates the necessity for cost-intensive priors in previous methods, thereby exhibiting superior training efficiency on the computationally intensive diffusion-based backbone. To further optimize training efficiency from the perspective of model architecture, we introduce a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture, which demonstrates the enhanced applicability in low-resource research scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that StableDub achieves superior performance in lip habit resemblance and occlusion robustness. Our method also surpasses other methods in audio-lip sync, video quality, and resolution consistency. We expand the applicability of visual dubbing methods from comprehensive aspects, and demo videos can be found at https://stabledub.github.io.