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
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:2608. 19900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For full-body avatars, modeling surface dynamics is crucial for overcoming the uncanny valley and achieving perceptual realism.
By Guoxing Sun, Heming Zhu, Linjie Lyu, Pascal Fua, Christian Theobalt, Marc Habermann
GSHeadRelight introduces a fast relighting method for 3D Gaussian head synthesis, addressing the need for photorealistic rendering, real‑time performance, and generalization to unseen subjects in portrait photography, VR, and AR. The approach uses a unified neural radiance transfer representation that linearly responds to incident light, relying only on in‑the‑wild images rather than expensive light stage data. It achieves state‑of‑the‑art relighting results while delivering a rendering speed 12× faster than prior 3D‑aware portrait relighting methods.
By Henglei Lv, Bailin Deng, Jianzhu Guo, Xiaoqiang Liu, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Lin Gao
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
Habitat-GS is a navigation-focused embodied AI simulator that extends Habitat‑Sim by incorporating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for real‑time photorealistic rendering and scalable asset import. It introduces a Gaussian avatar module that represents dynamic humans as both photorealistic visual entities and navigation obstacles, enabling agents to learn human‑aware behaviors. Experiments show that agents trained on 3DGS scenes generalize better across domains and that the avatar system supports effective human‑aware navigation while maintaining system scalability.
By Ziyuan Xia, Jingyi Xu, Chong Cui, Yuanhong Yu, Jiazhao Zhang, Qingsong Yan, Tao Ni, Junbo Chen, Xiaowei Zhou, Hujun Bao, Ruizhen Hu, Sida Peng