Wolfgang Paier

I am a Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer at Pipio AI, where I work on foundation video models for talking humans. My focus is on video diffusion models with high-quality lip synchronization, designed for video editing workflows.

Previously, I was a Research Associate in the Computer Vision & Graphics group at Fraunhofer HHI, where I worked on the generation and animation of 3D talking head models using VAEs, 3DMMs, and neural rendering.

I received my PhD from HU Berlin, where I was advised by Peter Eisert.

Research

My research interests span computer vision, computer graphics, deep learning, and generative AI. Currently, my work focuses on video diffusion models for synthesizing and editing human-centric video content, with an emphasis on realistic and accurate lip synchronization.

Publications

* Indicates first author or equal contribution

2026 publication EditYourself: Audio-Driven Generation and Manipulation of Talking Head Videos with Diffusion Transformers
John Flynn*, Wolfgang Paier*, Dimitar Dinev, Sam Nhut Nguyen, Hayk Poghosyan, Manuel Toribio, Sandipan Banerjee, Guy Gafni
arXiv:2601.22127, 2026

2024 publication Video-Driven Animation of Neural Head Avatars
Wolfgang Paier*, Paul Hinzer, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
Proc. International Workshop on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (VMV), 2024

Hybrid Methods for the Analysis and Synthesis of Human Faces
Wolfgang Paier
PhD Thesis, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät HU-Berlin, 2024

2023 publication Unsupervised Learning of Style-Aware Facial Animation from Real Acting Performances
Wolfgang Paier*, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
Graphical Models, 129, 101199, 2023

2021 publication Example-Based Facial Animation of Virtual Reality Avatars Using Auto-Regressive Neural Networks
Wolfgang Paier*, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 41(4), 52-63, 2021

2020 publication Neural Face Models for Example-Based Visual Speech Synthesis
Wolfgang Paier*, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH European conference on visual media production, 1-10, 2020

2020 publication Interactive Facial Animation with Deep Neural Networks
Wolfgang Paier*, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
IET Computer Vision, 14(6), 359-369, 2020