SoulX-LiveAct: Towards Hour-Scale Real-Time Human Animation with Neighbor Forcing and ConvKV Memory
SoulX-LiveAct presents a novel framework that enables lifelike, multimodal-controlled, high-fidelity human animation video generation for real-time streaming interactions.
(I) We identify diffusion-step-aligned neighbor latents as a key inductive bias for AR diffusion, providing a principled and theoretically grounded Neighbor Forcing for step-consistent AR video generation.
(II) We introduce ConvKV Memory, a lightweight plug-in compression mechanism that enables constant-memory hour-scale video generation with negligible overhead.
(III) We develop an optimized real-time system that achieves 20 FPS using only two H100/H200 GPUs with end-end adaptive FP8 precision, sequence parallelism, and operator fusion at 720×416 or 512×512 resolution.
🔥🔥🔥 News
- 📢 Mar 18, 2026: We now support consumer GPUs (e.g., RTX 4090, RTX 5090) with FP8 KV cache and CPU model offloading. In our tests, the 18B model (14B Wan2.1 + 4B audio module) achieves a throughput of 6 FPS on a single RTX 5090.
- 👋 Mar 16, 2026: We release the inference code and model weights of SoulX-LiveAct.
🎥 Demo
👫 Podcast
🎤 Music & Talk Show
📱 FaceTime
📑 Open-source Plan
- Release inference code and checkpoints
- GUI demo Support
- End-end adaptive FP8 precision
- Support model offloading for consumer GPUs (e.g., RTX 4090, RTX 5090) to reduce memory usage
- Support FP4 precision for B-series GPUs (e.g., RTX 5090, B100, B200)
- Release training code
▶️ Quick Start
🛠️ Dependencies and Installation
Step 1: Install Basic Dependencies
conda create -n liveact python=3.10 conda activate liveact pip install -r requirements.txt conda install conda-forge::sox -y
Step 2: Install SageAttention
To enable fp8 attention kernel, you need to install SageAttention:
-
Install SageAttention:
git clone https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention.git cd SageAttention git checkout v2.2.0 python setup.py install -
(Optional) Install the modified version of SageAttention: To enable SageAttention for QKV's operator fusion, you need to install it by the following command:
git clone https://github.com/ZhiqiJiang/SageAttentionFusion.git cd SageAttentionFusion python setup.py install
Step 3: Install vllm:
To enable fp8 gemm kernel, you need to install vllm:
pip install vllm==0.11.0
Step 4 Install LightVAE::
git clone https://github.com/ModelTC/LightX2V cd LightX2V python setup_vae.py install
🤗 Download Checkpoints
Model Cards
| ModelName | Download |
|---|---|
| SoulX-LiveAct | 🤗 Huggingface, 魔搭 ModelScope |
| chinese-wav2vec2-base | 🤗 Huggingface |
🔑 Inference
Usage of LiveAct
1. Run real-time streaming inference on two H100/H200 GPUs
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 \ torchrun --nproc_per_node=2 --master_port=$(shuf -n 1 -i 10000-65535) \ generate.py \ --size 416*720 \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --fps 20 \ --dura_print \ --input_json examples/example.json \ --steam_audio
2. Run with action or emotion editing at real-time streaming performance
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 \ torchrun --nproc_per_node=2 --master_port=$(shuf -n 1 -i 10000-65535) \ generate.py \ --size 512*512 \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --fps 24 \ --input_json examples/example_edit.json
3. Run with the best performance settings
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 \ torchrun --nproc_per_node=2 --master_port=$(shuf -n 1 -i 10000-65535) \ generate.py \ --size 480*832 \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --fps 24 \ --input_json examples/example.json
4. Run on RTX 4090/RTX 5090 GPUs
Note: FP8 KV cache may slightly affect generation quality.
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 \ python generate.py \ --size 416*720 \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --fps 24 \ --input_json examples/example.json \ --fp8_kv_cache \ --block_offload \ --t5_cpu
5. Run with single GPU for Eval
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 \ python generate.py \ --size 480*832 \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --fps 24 \ --input_json examples/example.json \ --audio_cfg 1.7 \ --t5_cpu
Command Line Arguments
| Argument | Type | Required | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
--size | str | Yes | - | The width and height of the generated video. |
--t5_cpu | bool | No | false | Whether to place T5 model on CPU. |
--offload_cache | bool | No | - | Whether to place kv cache on CPU. |
--fps | int | Yes | - | The target fps of the generated video. |
--audio_cfg | float | No | 1.0 | Classifier free guidance scale for audio control. |
--dura_print | bool | No | no | Whether print duration for every block. |
--input_json | str | Yes | _ | The condition json file path to generate the video. |
--seed | int | No | 42 | The seed to use for generating the image or video. |
--steam_audio | bool | No | false | Whether inference with steaming audio. |
--mean_memory | bool | No | false | Whether to use the mean memory strategy during inference for further performance improvement. |
--fp8_kv_cache | bool | No | false | Whether to store kv cache in FP8 and dequantize to BF16 on use. FP8 KV cache may slightly affect generation quality. |
--block_offload | bool | No | false | Whether to offload model blocks to CPU between block forwards. |
💻 GUI demo
Run SoulX-LiveAct inference on the GUI demo and evaluate real-time performance.
Note: The first few blocks during the initial run require warm-up. Normal performance will be observed from the second run onward.
1. Run real-time streaming inference on two H100/H200 GPUs
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 \ torchrun --nproc_per_node=2 --master_port=$(shuf -n 1 -i 10000-65535) \ demo.py \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --size 416*720 \ --video_save_path ./generated_videos
2. Run on RTX 4090/RTX 5090 GPUs
USE_CHANNELS_LAST_3D=1 CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 \ torchrun --nproc_per_node=1 --master_port=$(shuf -n 1 -i 10000-65535) \ demo.py \ --ckpt_dir MODEL_PATH \ --wav2vec_dir chinese-wav2vec2-base \ --size 416*720 \ --fp8_kv_cache \ --block_offload \ --t5_cpu \ --video_save_path ./generated_videos
📚 Citation
@misc{zhen2026soulxliveacthourscalerealtimehuman, title={SoulX-LiveAct: Towards Hour-Scale Real-Time Human Animation with Neighbor Forcing and ConvKV Memory}, author={Dingcheng Zhen and Xu Zheng and Ruixin Zhang and Zhiqi Jiang and Yichao Yan and Ming Tao and Shunshun Yin}, year={2026}, eprint={2603.11746}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.CV}, url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11746}, }
📮 Contact Us
If you are interested in leaving a message to our work, feel free to email dingchengzhen@soulapp.cn.
You’re welcome to join our WeChat group or Soul group for technical discussions.