Autoregressive video diffusion models support real-time synthesis but suffer from error accumulation and context loss over long horizons. We discover that attention heads in AR video diffusion transformers serve functionally distinct roles as local heads for detail refinement, anchor heads for structural stabilization, and memory heads for long-range context aggregation, yet existing methods treat them uniformly, leading to suboptimal KV cache allocation. We propose Head Forcing, a training-free framework that assigns each head type a tailored KV cache strategy: local and anchor heads retain only essential tokens, while memory heads employ a hierarchical memory system with dynamic episodic updates for long-range consistency. A head-wise RoPE re-encoding scheme further ensures positional encodings remain within the pretrained range. Without additional training, Head Forcing extends generation from 5 seconds to minute-level duration, supports multi-prompt interactive synthesis, and consistently outperforms existing baselines. Project Page: https://jiahaotian-sjtu.github.io/headforcing.github.io/.
In the setting of multi-head finite-state dimensions, trailing heads lag behind a leading head, accessing past data to aid a finite-state gambler placing bets on successive bits read by the leading head. Cruz, Glashausser, Li, and Lutz (2026) proved that, for any fixed number of trailing heads, adaptive (data-dependent) movement rules can strictly outperform oblivious (data-independent) movement schedules. In this paper we strengthen that separation by proving that a single trailing head with adaptive movements can outperform, by a large and uniform margin, arbitrarily many trailing heads with oblivious movements. Formally, our main theorem states that there is a binary sequence whose adaptive two-head finite-state strong dimension is less than its oblivious multi-head finite-state dimension, and that the gap is greater than 0.3.
Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is the core computational primitive underlying modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MHA suffers from a fundamental linear scaling limitation: $H$ attention heads produce exactly $H$ independent attention matrices, with no communication between heads during attention computation. This becomes problematic for multi-step reasoning, where correct answers depend on aggregating evidence from multiple parts of the context and composing latent token-to-token relations over a chain of intermediate inferences. To address this, we propose Interleaved Head Attention (IHA), which enables cross-head mixing by constructing $P$ pseudo-heads per head (typically $P=H$), where each pseudo query/key/value is a learned linear combination of all $H$ original queries, keys and values respectively. Interactions between pseudo-query and pseudo-key heads induce up to $P^2$ attention patterns per head with modest parameter overhead $\mathcal{O}(H^2P)$. We provide theory showing improved efficiency in terms of number of parameters on the synthetic Polynomial task (IHA uses $Θ(\sqrt{k}n^2)$ parameters vs. $Θ(kn^2)$ for MHA) and on the synthetic order-sensitive CPM-3 task (IH
Some transformer attention heads appear to function as membership testers, dedicating themselves to answering the question "has this token appeared before in the context?" We identify these heads across four language models (GPT-2 small, medium, and large; Pythia-160M) and show that they form a spectrum of membership-testing strategies. Two heads (L0H1 and L0H5 in GPT-2 small) function as high-precision membership filters with false positive rates of 0-4\% even at 180 unique context tokens -- well above the $d_\text{head} = 64$ bit capacity of a classical Bloom filter. A third head (L1H11) shows the classic Bloom filter capacity curve: its false positive rate follows the theoretical formula $p \approx (1 - e^{-kn/m})^k$ with $R^2 = 1.0$ and fitted capacity $m \approx 5$ bits, saturating by $n \approx 20$ unique tokens. A fourth head initially identified as a Bloom filter (L3H0) was reclassified as a general prefix-attention head after confound controls revealed its apparent capacity curve was a sequence-length artifact. Together, the three genuine membership-testing heads form a multi-resolution system concentrated in early layers (0-1), taxonomically distinct from induction and pr
Multi-head attention enables Transformers to capture diverse representations, but all attention heads are typically activated for every input, regardless of task complexity. For coarse-grained tasks such as text classification, where relevant information is often global, this fixed allocation can introduce unnecessary computation. We propose BudgetFormer, a Transformer architecture that dynamically allocates attention heads on a per-input basis. The model learns both a head budget and a relevance distribution to select the most informative heads. To support effective head selection, we introduce a training strategy that balances exploration and exploitation. Experiments on text classification tasks show that BudgetFormer reduces FLOPs and memory usage while matching or surpassing the performance of standard multi-head attention. These results highlight adaptive head allocation as an effective approach to improving Transformer efficiency and performance.
One-shot talking head generation has no explicit head movement reference, thus it is difficult to generate talking heads with head motions. Some existing works only edit the mouth area and generate still talking heads, leading to unreal talking head performance. Other works construct one-to-one mapping between audio signal and head motion sequences, introducing ambiguity correspondences into the mapping since people can behave differently in head motions when speaking the same content. This unreasonable mapping form fails to model the diversity and produces either nearly static or even exaggerated head motions, which are unnatural and strange. Therefore, the one-shot talking head generation task is actually a one-to-many ill-posed problem and people present diverse head motions when speaking. Based on the above observation, we propose OSM-Net, a \textit{one-to-many} one-shot talking head generation network with natural head motions. OSM-Net constructs a motion space that contains rich and various clip-level head motion features. Each basis of the space represents a feature of meaningful head motion in a clip rather than just a frame, thus providing more coherent and natural motion
Creating high-fidelity, animatable 3D talking heads is crucial for immersive applications, yet often hindered by the prevalence of low-quality image or video sources, which yield poor 3D reconstructions. In this paper, we introduce SuperHead, a novel framework for enhancing low-resolution, animatable 3D head avatars. The core challenge lies in synthesizing high-quality geometry and textures, while ensuring both 3D and temporal consistency during animation and preserving subject identity. Despite recent progress in image, video and 3D-based super-resolution (SR), existing SR techniques are ill-equipped to handle dynamic 3D inputs. To address this, SuperHead leverages the rich priors from pre-trained 3D generative models via a novel dynamics-aware 3D inversion scheme. This process optimizes the latent representation of the generative model to produce a super-resolved 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) head model, which is subsequently rigged to an underlying parametric head model (e.g., FLAME) for animation. The inversion is jointly supervised using a sparse collection of upscaled 2D face renderings and corresponding depth maps, captured from diverse facial expressions and camera viewpoint
Camera with a fisheye or ultra-wide lens covers a wide field of view that cannot be modeled by the perspective projection. Serious fisheye lens distortion in the peripheral region of the image leads to degraded performance of the existing head pose estimation models trained on undistorted images. This paper presents a new approach for head pose estimation that uses the knowledge of head location in the image to reduce the negative effect of fisheye distortion. We develop an end-to-end convolutional neural network to estimate the head pose with the multi-task learning of head pose and head location. Our proposed network estimates the head pose directly from the fisheye image without the operation of rectification or calibration. We also created a fisheye-distorted version of the three popular head pose estimation datasets, BIWI, 300W-LP, and AFLW2000 for our experiments. Experiments results show that our network remarkably improves the accuracy of head pose estimation compared with other state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage methods.
We identify a systematic attention collapse pathology in the BLOOM family of transformer language models, where ALiBi positional encoding causes 31-44% of attention heads to attend almost entirely to the beginning-of-sequence token. The collapse follows a predictable pattern across four model scales (560M to 7.1B parameters), concentrating in head indices where ALiBi's slope schedule imposes the steepest distance penalties. We introduce surgical reinitialization: targeted Q/K/V reinitialization with zeroed output projections and gradient-masked freezing of all non-surgical parameters. Applied to BLOOM-1b7 on a single consumer GPU, the technique recovers 98.7% operational head capacity (242 to 379 of 384 heads) in two passes. A controlled comparison with C4 training data confirms that reinitialization -- not corpus content -- drives recovery, and reveals two distinct post-surgical phenomena: early global functional redistribution that improves the model, and late local degradation that accumulates under noisy training signal. An extended experiment reinitializing mostly-healthy heads alongside collapsed ones produces a model that transiently outperforms stock BLOOM-1b7 by 25% on tra
The head swapping task aims at flawlessly placing a source head onto a target body, which is of great importance to various entertainment scenarios. While face swapping has drawn much attention, the task of head swapping has rarely been explored, particularly under the few-shot setting. It is inherently challenging due to its unique needs in head modeling and background blending. In this paper, we present the Head Swapper (HeSer), which achieves few-shot head swapping in the wild through two delicately designed modules. Firstly, a Head2Head Aligner is devised to holistically migrate pose and expression information from the target to the source head by examining multi-scale information. Secondly, to tackle the challenges of skin color variations and head-background mismatches in the swapping procedure, a Head2Scene Blender is introduced to simultaneously modify facial skin color and fill mismatched gaps in the background around the head. Particularly, seamless blending is achieved with the help of a Semantic-Guided Color Reference Creation procedure and a Blending UNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method produces superior head swapping results in a variety of
We present the first data-driven approach to model temporal gaze-head coordination from large-scale in-the-wild facial videos. To obtain training data for generalizable learning, we propose an automatic pipeline that extracts natural yet diverse gaze and head motions with off-the-shelf appearance-based gaze estimators. To capture the probabilistic correlation and temporal dynamics of gaze-head coordination, we build our model on a generative conditional Variational Autoencoder for plausible yet diverse gaze-conditioned head motion generations. We further apply our framework to gaze-controlled facial video generation, where we enable video generation with natural and realistic head motion correlated to the input gaze - an aspect that has not been emphasized before. Human evaluation and quantitative comparisons demonstrate our method's effectiveness and validate our design choices, with evaluators showing statistically significant preference for our approach over baseline methods.
We present NeckSense, a novel wearable system for head pose tracking that leverages multi-channel bio-impedance sensing with soft, dry electrodes embedded in a lightweight, necklace-style form factor. NeckSense captures dynamic changes in tissue impedance around the neck, which are modulated by head rotations and subtle muscle activations. To robustly estimate head pose, we propose a deep learning framework that integrates anatomical priors, including joint constraints and natural head rotation ranges, into the loss function design. We validate NeckSense on 7 participants using the current SOTA pose estimation model as ground truth. Our system achieves a mean per-vertex error of 25.9 mm across various head movements with a leave-one-person-out cross-validation method, demonstrating that a compact, line-of-sight-free bio-impedance wearable can deliver head-tracking performance comparable to SOTA vision-based methods.
Frozen Gemma 4 31B weights pretrained exclusively on text, unmodified, transfer through a thin trainable interface to non-text modalities the substrate has never processed. On the L24--L29 slice (192 attention heads), an English-text TxtCopy attention probe (95 sentences) and per-head ablation impact on four non-language token-pattern tasks (binary copy, associative recall, 1D cellular automaton Rule 90, binary addition) jointly classify four heads -- L26.28, L27.28, L27.2, L27.3 -- as top-tier on both signals. The slice-level joint coincidence is significant under hypergeometric null ($P = 0.0013$, $N=192$, $K=38$, $n=4$) and survives multiplicity-aware permutation tests ($P_{V4} = 0.013$). Pretrained Gemma L26 reaches 60.22% on OGBench cube-double-play-task1 vs ~1% for random-init Gemma ($+59$pt at $n=3$); a FrozenRandom-GPT2 control with correct $1/\sqrt{d_k}$ scaling also fails. Head-level causal validation: zeroing L26.28 in the trained cube-task1 IQL agent drops success $63.3\% \to 10.0\%$ vs $46.7\%$ for a layer-matched low-TxtCopy negative control ($3.2\times$ specificity at $n=30$; $n=5$ paired-$t$ $p=0.039$). A full L26 sweep places L26.28 at rank 4 of 32. Honest negative
Vision Transformers have made remarkable progress in recent years, achieving state-of-the-art performance in most vision tasks. A key component of this success is due to the introduction of the Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) module, which enables each head to learn different representations by applying the attention mechanism independently. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that Vision Transformers can be further enhanced by overlapping the heads in MHSA. We introduce Multi-Overlapped-Head Self-Attention (MOHSA), where heads are overlapped with their two adjacent heads for queries, keys, and values, while zero-padding is employed for the first and last heads, which have only one neighboring head. Various paradigms for overlapping ratios are proposed to fully investigate the optimal performance of our approach. The proposed approach is evaluated using five Transformer models on four benchmark datasets and yields a significant performance boost. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication.
One-shot talking head generation has received growing attention in recent years, with various creative and practical applications. An ideal natural and vivid generated talking head video should contain natural head pose changes. However, it is challenging to map head pose sequences from driving audio since there exists a natural gap between audio-visual modalities. In this work, we propose a Flow-guided One-shot model that achieves NaTural head motions(FONT) over generated talking heads. Specifically, the head pose prediction module is designed to generate head pose sequences from the source face and driving audio. We add the random sampling operation and the structural similarity constraint to model the diversity in the one-to-many mapping between audio-visual modality, thus predicting natural head poses. Then we develop a keypoint predictor that produces unsupervised keypoints from the source face, driving audio and pose sequences to describe the facial structure information. Finally, a flow-guided occlusion-aware generator is employed to produce photo-realistic talking head videos from the estimated keypoints and source face. Extensive experimental results prove that FONT genera
People differ in how much they move their head versus their eyes when shifting gaze, yet such tendencies remain largely unexplored in HCI. We introduce head movement tendencies as a fundamental dimension of individual difference in VR and provide a quantitative account of their population-level distribution. Using a 360° video free-viewing dataset (N=87), we model head contributions to gaze shifts with a hinge-based parametric function, revealing a spectrum of strategies from eye-movers to head-movers. We then conduct a user study (N=28) combining 360° video viewing with a short controlled task using gaze targets. While parameter values differ across tasks, individuals show partial alignment in their relative positions within the population, indicating that tendencies are meaningful but shaped by context. Our findings establish head movement tendencies as an important concept for VR and highlight implications for adaptive systems such as foveated rendering, viewport alignment, and multi-user experience design.
The automatic detection of pedestrian heads in crowded environments is essential for crowd analysis and management tasks, particularly in high-risk settings such as railway platforms and event entrances. These environments, characterized by dense crowds and dynamic movements, are underrepresented in public datasets, posing challenges for existing deep learning models. To address this gap, we introduce the Railway Platforms and Event Entrances-Heads (RPEE-Heads) dataset, a novel, diverse, high-resolution, and accurately annotated resource. It includes 109,913 annotated pedestrian heads across 1,886 images from 66 video recordings, with an average of 56.2 heads per image. Annotations include bounding boxes for visible head regions. In addition to introducing the RPEE-Heads dataset, this paper evaluates eight state-of-the-art object detection algorithms using the RPEE-Heads dataset and analyzes the impact of head size on detection accuracy. The experimental results show that You Only Look Once v9 and Real-Time Detection Transformer outperform the other algorithms, achieving mean average precisions of 90.7% and 90.8%, with inference times of 11 and 14 milliseconds, respectively. Moreov
Existing research on unconstrained in-the-wild head pose estimation suffers from the flaws of its datasets, which consist of either numerous samples by non-realistic synthesis or constrained collection, or small-scale natural images yet with plausible manual annotations. This makes fully-supervised solutions compromised due to the reliance on generous labels. To alleviate it, we propose the first semi-supervised unconstrained head pose estimation method SemiUHPE, which can leverage abundant easily available unlabeled head images. Technically, we choose semi-supervised rotation regression and adapt it to the error-sensitive and label-scarce problem of unconstrained head pose. Our method is based on the observation that the aspect-ratio invariant cropping of wild heads is superior to previous landmark-based affine alignment given that landmarks of unconstrained human heads are usually unavailable, especially for underexplored non-frontal heads. Instead of using a pre-fixed threshold to filter out pseudo labeled heads, we propose dynamic entropy based filtering to adaptively remove unlabeled outliers as training progresses by updating the threshold in multiple stages. We then revisit
Creating high-fidelity and editable head avatars is a pivotal challenge in computer vision and graphics, boosting many AR/VR applications. While recent advancements have achieved photorealistic renderings and plausible animation, head editing, especially real-time appearance editing, remains challenging due to the implicit representation and entangled modeling of the geometry and global appearance. To address this, we propose Surface-Volumetric Gaussian Head Avatar (SVG-Head), a novel hybrid representation that explicitly models the geometry with 3D Gaussians bound on a FLAME mesh and leverages disentangled texture images to capture the global appearance. Technically, it contains two types of Gaussians, in which surface Gaussians explicitly model the appearance of head avatars using learnable texture images, facilitating real-time texture editing, while volumetric Gaussians enhance the reconstruction quality of non-Lambertian regions (e.g., lips and hair). To model the correspondence between 3D world and texture space, we provide a mesh-aware Gaussian UV mapping method, which leverages UV coordinates given by the FLAME mesh to obtain sharp texture images and real-time rendering spe
Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. Traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) struggle to maintain consistent facial identity, while Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods, although they can address this issue, often produce mismatched lip movements, inadequate facial expressions, and unstable head poses. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic and artificial outcomes. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the "devil" in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk. This NeRF-based method effectively maintains subject identity, enhancing synchronization and realism in talking head synthesis. SyncTalk employs a Face-Sync Controller to align lip movements with speech and innovatively uses a 3D facial blendshape model to capture accurate facial expressions. Our Head-Sync Stabilizer optimizes head poses, achieving more natural head movements. The Portrait-Sync Generator restores