Meituan's LongCat team shipped a quiet but meaningful update to its open-source talking-avatar stack: version 1.5 swaps the audio encoder, distills sampling down to 8 steps, and adds an INT8 path to fit the model on tighter GPUs. Here's what actually changed under the hood, and which flags you now have to pass.
LongCat-Video-Avatar 1.5: DMD2 distillation, Wav2Vec2 replacement, and INT8 offloading
LongCat-Video-Avatar 1.5 is an audio-driven talking-avatar generator that turns one portrait plus an audio clip into a lip-synced video with head motion, expression, and body dynamics. Released May 21, 2026, it is an avatar head built on the 13.6-billion-parameter dense LongCat-Video diffusion transformer [base model, Oct 2025]. The headline change: v1.5 replaces the Wav2Vec2 audio encoder used in v1.0 (Dec 16, 2025) with Whisper-Large-v3, which the team attributes to smoother, more natural lip dynamics.
Three new flags define the v1.5 workflow, none of which exist in v1.0:
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