arXiv Computer Vision

Video Diffusion Avatars: Taming Video Diffusion Models into Controllable 3D Avatars

Video Diffusion Avatars (VDAs) fine‑tune video diffusion models to generate photo‑realistic, multi‑view consistent avatars from a single image, allowing precise control over camera viewpoint, facial expression, and upper‑body pose. VDAs replace traditional 3D morphable models with a learned expression space, overcoming viewpoint bias through disentanglement and enabling independent control of expression, pose, and viewpoint via proxy‑mesh renderings. The method trains efficiently—34 hours on a single A100—and outperforms state‑of‑the‑art single‑image 3D avatars, improving novel‑view reenactment metrics and producing physically plausible hair dynamics, shadows, reflections, and refractions.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

GHARP: Real-time Gaussian Head Animation from Large-scale Reconstruction Prior

GHARP is a two‑stage method that animates 3D human heads in real time using a large‑scale reconstruction prior. The first offline identity stage builds a compact Gaussian representation of a subject’s geometry and appearance, while the lightweight runtime animation stage predicts expression‑dependent residuals in a semantically structured latent space. A body alignment network further refines the animation by aligning body pose and clothing, enabling state‑of‑the‑art quality on the Ava‑256 benchmark with significantly faster performance and fewer Gaussians.

By Ali Benlalah, Sepehr Johari, Patricia Vitoria, Armin Kappeler, Artem Sevastopolsky, Alexander Jung, Gabriele Fanelli, Kevin Mader, Manuel Breitenstein, Claudia Pl\"uss, Jan R\"uegg, Simon Biland, Thomas Etterlin, Dmitry Kostiaev, Mathias Deschler, Brian Amberg, Sebastian Martin
arXiv AI
Oct 2

One Basis to Animate Them All: Gaussian Blendshape Distillation for Real-Time Avatars

The paper introduces GALA, a distillation technique that replaces costly neural decoding in 3D Gaussian avatars with a shallow MLP predicting blendshape coefficients, enabling real‑time animation. By constructing a basis via block‑local PCA under a rendering‑aware metric, GALA achieves high fidelity while reducing memory usage. Experiments on three avatar models show up to three orders of magnitude lower CPU cost and frame rates up to 60fps on mobile devices.

By Ramazan Fazylov, Stamatis Lefkimmiatis, Ivan Laptev
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

AGORA: Adversarial Generation Of Real-time Animatable 3D Gaussian Head Avatars

AGORA is a new framework that extends 3D Gaussian Splatting with a generative adversarial network to produce high‑fidelity, animatable 3D head avatars. It introduces a lightweight FLAME‑conditioned deformation branch that predicts per‑Gaussian residuals for identity‑preserving, fine‑grained expression control, and a dual‑discriminator training scheme that enforces expression fidelity. The system achieves real‑time inference at 250 FPS on a single GPU and, for the first time, CPU‑only animatable 3DGS avatar synthesis at ~9 FPS.

By Ramazan Fazylov, Sergey Zagoruyko, Aleksandr Parkin, Stamatis Lefkimmiatis, Ivan Laptev
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

An Evaluation Framework for Generating Multi-View Images of a Person in a Scene

The paper introduces a framework for generating multi‑view images of a person within a natural scene, addressing the scarcity of paired multi‑view datasets for human subjects. It evaluates existing diffusion‑based image‑editing models and finds they often hallucinate head‑turn angles, leading to inconsistent backgrounds. To overcome this, the authors propose the Head Scene Rotation Difference (HSRD) metric, which separates camera movement from head pose changes and enables reliable assessment of 3D spatial parallax for constructing high‑quality synthetic datasets.

By Mahir Majid, Young Kyung Kim, Guillermo Sapiro