arXiv Computer Vision

MGAvatar: Mesh-Bound Gaussians for Head Avatar Geometry and Appearance Modeling

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 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 19

OMEGA-Avatar: One-shot Modeling of 360{\deg} Gaussian Avatars

OMEGA-Avatar is a feed‑forward framework that creates a 360° complete, animatable 3D Gaussian head from a single image. It introduces a semantic‑aware mesh deformation module to improve hair modeling while preserving topology, and a multi‑view feature splatting module that builds a shared canonical UV representation for consistent, high‑frequency detail across all viewpoints. Experiments show it outperforms existing baselines in full‑head completeness and identity preservation.

By Zehao Xia, Yiqun Wang, Zhengda Lu, Kai Liu, Jun Xiao, Peter Wonka
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 28

NBAvatar: Neural Billboards Avatars with Realistic Hand-Face Interaction

NBAvatar is a method for realistic rendering of head avatars that handles non‑rigid deformations caused by hand‑face interaction. It introduces a hybrid implicit‑explicit representation, combining explicit oriented planar primitives with implicit neural rendering, and uses a geometry‑aware training scheme to jointly optimize these representations. The approach achieves up to 53% LPIPS reduction compared to Gaussian‑based avatar methods, improves PSNR and SSIM, and surpasses the state‑of‑the‑art InteractAvatar in structural similarity for novel‑view and novel‑pose rendering.

By David Svitov, Mahtab Dahaghin, Pietro Morerio, Alessio Del Bue