X2C: A Dataset Featuring Nuanced Facial Expressions for Realistic Humanoid Imitation

Published August 11, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2505.11146v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-grained facial expression transfer from humans to humanoid agents presents a unique pattern recognition challenge due to the significant domain gap between biological facial dynamics and mechanical control spaces. While visual synthesis of talking heads has advanced rapidly, mapping high-dimensional visual cues to precise, physically constrained actuation signals remains an open problem, primarily due to the lack of large-scale paired data. To bridge this gap, we introduce X2C, a comprehensive benchmark dataset comprising 100,000 (image, control value) pairs. Unlike existing resources, X2C features nuanced, physically grounded expressions annotated with 30 continuous control parameters, establishing a high-fidelity standard for this task. Building on this resource, we propose X2CNet, a two-stage deep learning framework that explicitly decouples visual motion features from mechanical control regression to model the correspondence between human perceptual cues and humanoid actuation. Extensive experiments, including quantitative benchmarking and real-world physical validation, demonstrate that our approach achieves superior cross-domain consistency and enables robust, in-the-wild expression imitation. Code and Data: https://lipzh5.github.io/X2CNet/

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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