Daily Papers

Talking head generation is increasingly important in virtual reality (VR), especially for social scenarios involving multi-turn conversation. Existing approaches face notable limitations: mesh-based 3D methods can model dual-person dialogue but lack realistic textures, while large-model-based 2D methods produce natural appearances but incur prohibitive computational costs. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based methods achieve efficient and realistic rendering but remain speaker-only and ignore social relationships. We introduce RSATalker, the first framework that leverages 3DGS for realistic and socially-aware talking head generation with support for multi-turn conversation. Our method first drives mesh-based 3D facial motion from speech, then binds 3D Gaussians to mesh facets to render high-fidelity 2D avatar videos. To capture interpersonal dynamics, we propose a socially-aware module that encodes social relationships, including blood and non-blood as well as equal and unequal, into high-level embeddings through a learnable query mechanism. We design a three-stage training paradigm and construct the RSATalker dataset with speech-mesh-image triplets annotated with social relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSATalker achieves state-of-the-art performance in both realism and social awareness. The code and dataset will be released.

Nowadays, it is possible to scan faces and automatically register them with high quality. However, the resulting face meshes often need further processing: we need to stabilize them to remove unwanted head movement. Stabilization is important for tasks like game development or movie making which require facial expressions to be cleanly separated from rigid head motion. Since manual stabilization is labor-intensive, there have been attempts to automate it. However, previous methods remain impractical: they either still require some manual input, produce imprecise alignments, rely on dubious heuristics and slow optimization, or assume a temporally ordered input. Instead, we present a new learning-based approach that is simple and fully automatic. We treat stabilization as a regression problem: given two face meshes, our network directly predicts the rigid transform between them that brings their skulls into alignment. We generate synthetic training data using a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), exploiting the fact that 3DMM parameters separate skull motion from facial skin motion. Through extensive experiments we show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art both quantitatively and qualitatively on the tasks of stabilizing discrete sets of facial expressions as well as dynamic facial performances. Furthermore, we provide an ablation study detailing the design choices and best practices to help others adopt our approach for their own uses. Supplementary videos can be found on the project webpage syntec-research.github.io/FaceStab.

3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) demonstrate great potential for reconstructing faithful and animatable 3D facial surfaces from a single image. The facial surface is influenced by the coarse shape, as well as the static detail (e,g., person-specific appearance) and dynamic detail (e.g., expression-driven wrinkles). Previous work struggles to decouple the static and dynamic details through image-level supervision, leading to reconstructions that are not realistic. In this paper, we aim at high-fidelity 3D face reconstruction and propose HiFace to explicitly model the static and dynamic details. Specifically, the static detail is modeled as the linear combination of a displacement basis, while the dynamic detail is modeled as the linear interpolation of two displacement maps with polarized expressions. We exploit several loss functions to jointly learn the coarse shape and fine details with both synthetic and real-world datasets, which enable HiFace to reconstruct high-fidelity 3D shapes with animatable details. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that HiFace presents state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and faithfully recovers both the static and dynamic details. Our project page can be found at https://project-hiface.github.io.

Significant progress has been made for speech-driven 3D face animation, but most works focus on learning the motion of mesh/geometry, ignoring the impact of dynamic texture. In this work, we reveal that dynamic texture plays a key role in rendering high-fidelity talking avatars, and introduce a high-resolution 4D dataset TexTalk4D, consisting of 100 minutes of audio-synced scan-level meshes with detailed 8K dynamic textures from 100 subjects. Based on the dataset, we explore the inherent correlation between motion and texture, and propose a diffusion-based framework TexTalker to simultaneously generate facial motions and dynamic textures from speech. Furthermore, we propose a novel pivot-based style injection strategy to capture the complicity of different texture and motion styles, which allows disentangled control. TexTalker, as the first method to generate audio-synced facial motion with dynamic texture, not only outperforms the prior arts in synthesising facial motions, but also produces realistic textures that are consistent with the underlying facial movements. Project page: https://xuanchenli.github.io/TexTalk/.

We present 3DiFACE, a novel method for personalized speech-driven 3D facial animation and editing. While existing methods deterministically predict facial animations from speech, they overlook the inherent one-to-many relationship between speech and facial expressions, i.e., there are multiple reasonable facial expression animations matching an audio input. It is especially important in content creation to be able to modify generated motion or to specify keyframes. To enable stochasticity as well as motion editing, we propose a lightweight audio-conditioned diffusion model for 3D facial motion. This diffusion model can be trained on a small 3D motion dataset, maintaining expressive lip motion output. In addition, it can be finetuned for specific subjects, requiring only a short video of the person. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and yields speech-driven animations with greater fidelity and diversity.

We introduce StyleMM, a novel framework that can construct a stylized 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) based on user-defined text descriptions specifying a target style. Building upon a pre-trained mesh deformation network and a texture generator for original 3DMM-based realistic human faces, our approach fine-tunes these models using stylized facial images generated via text-guided image-to-image (i2i) translation with a diffusion model, which serve as stylization targets for the rendered mesh. To prevent undesired changes in identity, facial alignment, or expressions during i2i translation, we introduce a stylization method that explicitly preserves the facial attributes of the source image. By maintaining these critical attributes during image stylization, the proposed approach ensures consistent 3D style transfer across the 3DMM parameter space through image-based training. Once trained, StyleMM enables feed-forward generation of stylized face meshes with explicit control over shape, expression, and texture parameters, producing meshes with consistent vertex connectivity and animatability. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of identity-level facial diversity and stylization capability. The code and videos are available at [kwanyun.github.io/stylemm_page](kwanyun.github.io/stylemm_page).

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D facial motions from audio sequences using key motion embeddings. Despite recent advancements in data-driven techniques, accurately mapping between audio signals and 3D facial meshes remains challenging. Direct regression of the entire sequence often leads to over-smoothed results due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. To this end, we propose a progressive learning mechanism that generates 3D facial animations by introducing key motion capture to decrease cross-modal mapping uncertainty and learning complexity. Concretely, our method integrates linguistic and data-driven priors through two modules: the linguistic-based key motion acquisition and the cross-modal motion completion. The former identifies key motions and learns the associated 3D facial expressions, ensuring accurate lip-speech synchronization. The latter extends key motions into a full sequence of 3D talking faces guided by audio features, improving temporal coherence and audio-visual consistency. Extensive experimental comparisons against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach in generating more vivid and consistent talking face animations. Consistent enhancements in results through the integration of our proposed learning scheme with existing methods underscore the efficacy of our approach. Our code and weights will be at the project website: https://github.com/ffxzh/KMTalk.

Creating a 360{\deg} parametric model of a human head is a very challenging task. While recent advancements have demonstrated the efficacy of leveraging synthetic data for building such parametric head models, their performance remains inadequate in crucial areas such as expression-driven animation, hairstyle editing, and text-based modifications. In this paper, we build a dataset of artist-designed high-fidelity human heads and propose to create a novel parametric 360{\deg} renderable parametric head model from it. Our scheme decouples the facial motion/shape and facial appearance, which are represented by a classic parametric 3D mesh model and an attached neural texture, respectively. We further propose a training method for decompositing hairstyle and facial appearance, allowing free-swapping of the hairstyle. A novel inversion fitting method is presented based on single image input with high generalization and fidelity. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first parametric 3D full-head that achieves 360{\deg} free-view synthesis, image-based fitting, appearance editing, and animation within a single model. Experiments show that facial motions and appearances are well disentangled in the parametric space, leading to SOTA performance in rendering and animating quality. The code and SynHead100 dataset are released at https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Head360.

When working with 3D facial data, improving fidelity and avoiding the uncanny valley effect is critically dependent on accurate 3D facial performance capture. Because such methods are expensive and due to the widespread availability of 2D videos, recent methods have focused on how to perform monocular 3D face tracking. However, these methods often fall short in capturing precise facial movements due to limitations in their network architecture, training, and evaluation processes. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel face tracker, FlowFace, that introduces an innovative 2D alignment network for dense per-vertex alignment. Unlike prior work, FlowFace is trained on high-quality 3D scan annotations rather than weak supervision or synthetic data. Our 3D model fitting module jointly fits a 3D face model from one or many observations, integrating existing neutral shape priors for enhanced identity and expression disentanglement and per-vertex deformations for detailed facial feature reconstruction. Additionally, we propose a novel metric and benchmark for assessing tracking accuracy. Our method exhibits superior performance on both custom and publicly available benchmarks. We further validate the effectiveness of our tracker by generating high-quality 3D data from 2D videos, which leads to performance gains on downstream tasks.

Predominant techniques on talking head generation largely depend on 2D information, including facial appearances and motions from input face images. Nevertheless, dense 3D facial geometry, such as pixel-wise depth, plays a critical role in constructing accurate 3D facial structures and suppressing complex background noises for generation. However, dense 3D annotations for facial videos is prohibitively costly to obtain. In this work, firstly, we present a novel self-supervised method for learning dense 3D facial geometry (ie, depth) from face videos, without requiring camera parameters and 3D geometry annotations in training. We further propose a strategy to learn pixel-level uncertainties to perceive more reliable rigid-motion pixels for geometry learning. Secondly, we design an effective geometry-guided facial keypoint estimation module, providing accurate keypoints for generating motion fields. Lastly, we develop a 3D-aware cross-modal (ie, appearance and depth) attention mechanism, which can be applied to each generation layer, to capture facial geometries in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on three challenging benchmarks (ie, VoxCeleb1, VoxCeleb2, and HDTF). The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can generate highly realistic-looking reenacted talking videos, with new state-of-the-art performances established on these benchmarks. The codes and trained models are publicly available on the GitHub project page at https://github.com/harlanhong/CVPR2022-DaGAN

We present a framework for generating full-bodied photorealistic avatars that gesture according to the conversational dynamics of a dyadic interaction. Given speech audio, we output multiple possibilities of gestural motion for an individual, including face, body, and hands. The key behind our method is in combining the benefits of sample diversity from vector quantization with the high-frequency details obtained through diffusion to generate more dynamic, expressive motion. We visualize the generated motion using highly photorealistic avatars that can express crucial nuances in gestures (e.g. sneers and smirks). To facilitate this line of research, we introduce a first-of-its-kind multi-view conversational dataset that allows for photorealistic reconstruction. Experiments show our model generates appropriate and diverse gestures, outperforming both diffusion- and VQ-only methods. Furthermore, our perceptual evaluation highlights the importance of photorealism (vs. meshes) in accurately assessing subtle motion details in conversational gestures. Code and dataset available online.

Current advances in human head modeling allow to generate plausible-looking 3D head models via neural representations. Nevertheless, constructing complete high-fidelity head models with explicitly controlled animation remains an issue. Furthermore, completing the head geometry based on a partial observation, e.g. coming from a depth sensor, while preserving details is often problematic for the existing methods. We introduce a generative model for detailed 3D head meshes on top of an articulated 3DMM which allows explicit animation and high-detail preservation at the same time. Our method is trained in two stages. First, we register a parametric head model with vertex displacements to each mesh of the recently introduced NPHM dataset of accurate 3D head scans. The estimated displacements are baked into a hand-crafted UV layout. Second, we train a StyleGAN model in order to generalize over the UV maps of displacements. The decomposition of the parametric model and high-quality vertex displacements allows us to animate the model and modify it semantically. We demonstrate the results of unconditional generation and fitting to the full or partial observation. The project page is available at https://seva100.github.io/headcraft.

Radiance fields have demonstrated impressive performance in synthesizing lifelike 3D talking heads. However, due to the difficulty in fitting steep appearance changes, the prevailing paradigm that presents facial motions by directly modifying point appearance may lead to distortions in dynamic regions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce TalkingGaussian, a deformation-based radiance fields framework for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. Leveraging the point-based Gaussian Splatting, facial motions can be represented in our method by applying smooth and continuous deformations to persistent Gaussian primitives, without requiring to learn the difficult appearance change like previous methods. Due to this simplification, precise facial motions can be synthesized while keeping a highly intact facial feature. Under such a deformation paradigm, we further identify a face-mouth motion inconsistency that would affect the learning of detailed speaking motions. To address this conflict, we decompose the model into two branches separately for the face and inside mouth areas, therefore simplifying the learning tasks to help reconstruct more accurate motion and structure of the mouth region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method renders high-quality lip-synchronized talking head videos, with better facial fidelity and higher efficiency compared with previous methods.

Our goal is to create a realistic 3D facial avatar with hair and accessories using only a text description. While this challenge has attracted significant recent interest, existing methods either lack realism, produce unrealistic shapes, or do not support editing, such as modifications to the hairstyle. We argue that existing methods are limited because they employ a monolithic modeling approach, using a single representation for the head, face, hair, and accessories. Our observation is that the hair and face, for example, have very different structural qualities that benefit from different representations. Building on this insight, we generate avatars with a compositional model, in which the head, face, and upper body are represented with traditional 3D meshes, and the hair, clothing, and accessories with neural radiance fields (NeRF). The model-based mesh representation provides a strong geometric prior for the face region, improving realism while enabling editing of the person's appearance. By using NeRFs to represent the remaining components, our method is able to model and synthesize parts with complex geometry and appearance, such as curly hair and fluffy scarves. Our novel system synthesizes these high-quality compositional avatars from text descriptions. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, Text-guided generation and Editing of Compositional Avatars (TECA), produces avatars that are more realistic than those of recent methods while being editable because of their compositional nature. For example, our TECA enables the seamless transfer of compositional features like hairstyles, scarves, and other accessories between avatars. This capability supports applications such as virtual try-on.

We present SplatFace, a novel Gaussian splatting framework designed for 3D human face reconstruction without reliance on accurate pre-determined geometry. Our method is designed to simultaneously deliver both high-quality novel view rendering and accurate 3D mesh reconstructions. We incorporate a generic 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) to provide a surface geometric structure, making it possible to reconstruct faces with a limited set of input images. We introduce a joint optimization strategy that refines both the Gaussians and the morphable surface through a synergistic non-rigid alignment process. A novel distance metric, splat-to-surface, is proposed to improve alignment by considering both the Gaussian position and covariance. The surface information is also utilized to incorporate a world-space densification process, resulting in superior reconstruction quality. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed method is competitive with both other Gaussian splatting techniques in novel view synthesis and other 3D reconstruction methods in producing 3D face meshes with high geometric precision.

Rendering photorealistic and dynamically moving human heads is crucial for ensuring a pleasant and immersive experience in AR/VR and video conferencing applications. However, existing methods often struggle to model challenging facial regions (e.g., mouth interior, eyes, hair/beard), resulting in unrealistic and blurry results. In this paper, we propose {\fullname} ({\name}), a method that adopts the neural point representation as well as the neural volume rendering process and discards the predefined connectivity and hard correspondence imposed by mesh-based approaches. Specifically, the neural points are strategically constrained around the surface of the target expression via a high-resolution UV displacement map, achieving increased modeling capacity and more accurate control. We introduce three technical innovations to improve the rendering and training efficiency: a patch-wise depth-guided (shading point) sampling strategy, a lightweight radiance decoding process, and a Grid-Error-Patch (GEP) ray sampling strategy during training. By design, our {\name} is better equipped to handle topologically changing regions and thin structures while also ensuring accurate expression control when animating avatars. Experiments conducted on three subjects from the Multiface dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our designs, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods, especially in handling challenging facial regions.

Animatronic faces are a central component of socially interactive robots, enabling rich nonverbal communication through facial articulation. However, state-of-the-art animatronic faces are typically tailored systems: each new facial geometry requires extensive manual mechanical redesign, making large-scale personalization prohibitively slow and costly. In this work, we pursue automated and scalable mechanical face synthesis, aiming to rapidly generate a physically realizable facial mechanism for a wide range of facial geometries. We introduce a parametric, linkage-driven mechanical face template whose topology and actuator layout are explicitly parameterized to support systematic scaling and retargeting across diverse facial morphologies. Building on this template, we propose a hierarchical automatic design algorithm that takes a single 2D portrait as input, reconstructs a target 3D face, and synthesizes a collision-free, manufacturable internal mechanism. The algorithm combines anatomy-guided feasible motion volumes, Action Unit (AU)-derived trajectory-based expressiveness objectives, and a collision-driven outer-loop refinement strategy. Beyond hardware synthesis, we argue that future mechanical faces deployed at scale must engage in bidirectional, multi-turn conversation rather than functioning solely as speaking or listening heads. To this end, we develop a dual-identity conversational facial motion synthesis framework that jointly models speaking and listening behaviors from audio, producing temporally coherent 3D facial motion suitable for physical execution. We validate our system through extensive experiments, including (i) quantitative evaluation of automatic mechanism synthesis across diverse facial geometries, (ii) comparisons against manual mechanical design, (iii) benchmarks on conversational facial motion synthesis and real-time deployment, and (iv) perceptual user studies.

This work studies learning from a synergy process of 3D Morphable Models (3DMM) and 3D facial landmarks to predict complete 3D facial geometry, including 3D alignment, face orientation, and 3D face modeling. Our synergy process leverages a representation cycle for 3DMM parameters and 3D landmarks. 3D landmarks can be extracted and refined from face meshes built by 3DMM parameters. We next reverse the representation direction and show that predicting 3DMM parameters from sparse 3D landmarks improves the information flow. Together we create a synergy process that utilizes the relation between 3D landmarks and 3DMM parameters, and they collaboratively contribute to better performance. We extensively validate our contribution on full tasks of facial geometry prediction and show our superior and robust performance on these tasks for various scenarios. Particularly, we adopt only simple and widely-used network operations to attain fast and accurate facial geometry prediction. Codes and data: https://choyingw.github.io/works/SynergyNet/

While current face animation methods can manipulate expressions individually, they suffer from several limitations. The expressions manipulated by some motion-based facial reenactment models are crude. Other ideas modeled with facial action units cannot generalize to arbitrary expressions not covered by annotations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Geometry-aware Facial Expression Translation (GaFET) framework, which is based on parametric 3D facial representations and can stably decoupled expression. Among them, a Multi-level Feature Aligned Transformer is proposed to complement non-geometric facial detail features while addressing the alignment challenge of spatial features. Further, we design a De-expression model based on StyleGAN, in order to reduce the learning difficulty of GaFET in unpaired "in-the-wild" images. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that we achieve higher-quality and more accurate facial expression transfer results compared to state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrate applicability of various poses and complex textures. Besides, videos or annotated training data are omitted, making our method easier to use and generalize.

Despite much progress, achieving real-time high-fidelity head avatar animation is still difficult and existing methods have to trade-off between speed and quality. 3DMM based methods often fail to model non-facial structures such as eyeglasses and hairstyles, while neural implicit models suffer from deformation inflexibility and rendering inefficiency. Although 3D Gaussian has been demonstrated to possess promising capability for geometry representation and radiance field reconstruction, applying 3D Gaussian in head avatar creation remains a major challenge since it is difficult for 3D Gaussian to model the head shape variations caused by changing poses and expressions. In this paper, we introduce PSAvatar, a novel framework for animatable head avatar creation that utilizes discrete geometric primitive to create a parametric morphable shape model and employs 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and high fidelity rendering. The parametric morphable shape model is a Point-based Morphable Shape Model (PMSM) which uses points instead of meshes for 3D representation to achieve enhanced representation flexibility. The PMSM first converts the FLAME mesh to points by sampling on the surfaces as well as off the meshes to enable the reconstruction of not only surface-like structures but also complex geometries such as eyeglasses and hairstyles. By aligning these points with the head shape in an analysis-by-synthesis manner, the PMSM makes it possible to utilize 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and appearance modeling, thus enabling the creation of high-fidelity avatars. We show that PSAvatar can reconstruct high-fidelity head avatars of a variety of subjects and the avatars can be animated in real-time (ge 25 fps at a resolution of 512 times 512 ).

In this study, we propose a method for video face reenactment that integrates a 3D face parametric model into a latent diffusion framework, aiming to improve shape consistency and motion control in existing video-based face generation approaches. Our approach employs the FLAME (Faces Learned with an Articulated Model and Expressions) model as the 3D face parametric representation, providing a unified framework for modeling face expressions and head pose. This not only enables precise extraction of motion features from driving videos, but also contributes to the faithful preservation of face shape and geometry. Specifically, we enhance the latent diffusion model with rich 3D expression and detailed pose information by incorporating depth maps, normal maps, and rendering maps derived from FLAME sequences. These maps serve as motion guidance and are encoded into the denoising UNet through a specifically designed Geometric Guidance Encoder (GGE). A multi-layer feature fusion module with integrated self-attention mechanisms is used to combine facial appearance and motion latent features within the spatial domain. By utilizing the 3D face parametric model as motion guidance, our method enables parametric alignment of face identity between the reference image and the motion captured from the driving video. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method excels at generating high-quality face animations with precise expression and head pose variation modeling. In addition, it demonstrates strong generalization performance on out-of-domain images. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/weimengting/MagicPortrait.

Recent years have witnessed considerable achievements in facial avatar reconstruction with neural volume rendering. Despite notable advancements, the reconstruction of complex and dynamic head movements from monocular videos still suffers from capturing and restoring fine-grained details. In this work, we propose a novel approach, named Tri^2-plane, for monocular photo-realistic volumetric head avatar reconstructions. Distinct from the existing works that rely on a single tri-plane deformation field for dynamic facial modeling, the proposed Tri^2-plane leverages the principle of feature pyramids and three top-to-down lateral connections tri-planes for details improvement. It samples and renders facial details at multiple scales, transitioning from the entire face to specific local regions and then to even more refined sub-regions. Moreover, we incorporate a camera-based geometry-aware sliding window method as an augmentation in training, which improves the robustness beyond the canonical space, with a particular improvement in cross-identity generation capabilities. Experimental outcomes indicate that the Tri^2-plane not only surpasses existing methodologies but also achieves superior performance across quantitative and qualitative assessments. The project website is: https://songluchuan.github.io/Tri2Plane.github.io/.

Facial expression and hand motions are necessary to express our emotions and interact with the world. Nevertheless, most of the 3D human avatars modeled from a casually captured video only support body motions without facial expressions and hand motions.In this work, we present ExAvatar, an expressive whole-body 3D human avatar learned from a short monocular video. We design ExAvatar as a combination of the whole-body parametric mesh model (SMPL-X) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The main challenges are 1) a limited diversity of facial expressions and poses in the video and 2) the absence of 3D observations, such as 3D scans and RGBD images. The limited diversity in the video makes animations with novel facial expressions and poses non-trivial. In addition, the absence of 3D observations could cause significant ambiguity in human parts that are not observed in the video, which can result in noticeable artifacts under novel motions. To address them, we introduce our hybrid representation of the mesh and 3D Gaussians. Our hybrid representation treats each 3D Gaussian as a vertex on the surface with pre-defined connectivity information (i.e., triangle faces) between them following the mesh topology of SMPL-X. It makes our ExAvatar animatable with novel facial expressions by driven by the facial expression space of SMPL-X. In addition, by using connectivity-based regularizers, we significantly reduce artifacts in novel facial expressions and poses.

Photorealistic 3D head avatar reconstruction faces critical challenges in modeling dynamic face-hair interactions and achieving cross-identity generalization, particularly during expressions and head movements. We present LUCAS, a novel Universal Prior Model (UPM) for codec avatar modeling that disentangles face and hair through a layered representation. Unlike previous UPMs that treat hair as an integral part of the head, our approach separates the modeling of the hairless head and hair into distinct branches. LUCAS is the first to introduce a mesh-based UPM, facilitating real-time rendering on devices. Our layered representation also improves the anchor geometry for precise and visually appealing Gaussian renderings. Experimental results indicate that LUCAS outperforms existing single-mesh and Gaussian-based avatar models in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, including evaluations on held-out subjects in zero-shot driving scenarios. LUCAS demonstrates superior dynamic performance in managing head pose changes, expression transfer, and hairstyle variations, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D head avatar reconstruction.

Reconstructing personalized animatable head avatars has significant implications in the fields of AR/VR. Existing methods for achieving explicit face control of 3D Morphable Models (3DMM) typically rely on multi-view images or videos of a single subject, making the reconstruction process complex. Additionally, the traditional rendering pipeline is time-consuming, limiting real-time animation possibilities. In this paper, we introduce CVTHead, a novel approach that generates controllable neural head avatars from a single reference image using point-based neural rendering. CVTHead considers the sparse vertices of mesh as the point set and employs the proposed Vertex-feature Transformer to learn local feature descriptors for each vertex. This enables the modeling of long-range dependencies among all the vertices. Experimental results on the VoxCeleb dataset demonstrate that CVTHead achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art graphics-based methods. Moreover, it enables efficient rendering of novel human heads with various expressions, head poses, and camera views. These attributes can be explicitly controlled using the coefficients of 3DMMs, facilitating versatile and realistic animation in real-time scenarios.

Creating high-fidelity head avatars from multi-view videos is a core issue for many AR/VR applications. However, existing methods usually struggle to obtain high-quality renderings for all different head components simultaneously since they use one single representation to model components with drastically different characteristics (e.g., skin vs. hair). In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Mesh-Gaussian Head Avatar (MeGA) that models different head components with more suitable representations. Specifically, we select an enhanced FLAME mesh as our facial representation and predict a UV displacement map to provide per-vertex offsets for improved personalized geometric details. To achieve photorealistic renderings, we obtain facial colors using deferred neural rendering and disentangle neural textures into three meaningful parts. For hair modeling, we first build a static canonical hair using 3D Gaussian Splatting. A rigid transformation and an MLP-based deformation field are further applied to handle complex dynamic expressions. Combined with our occlusion-aware blending, MeGA generates higher-fidelity renderings for the whole head and naturally supports more downstream tasks. Experiments on the NeRSemble dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our designs, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods and supporting various editing functionalities, including hairstyle alteration and texture editing.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has recently garnered attention due to its cost-effective usability in multimedia production. However, most current advances overlook the intelligibility of lip movements, limiting the realism of facial expressions. In this paper, we introduce a method for speech-driven 3D facial animation to generate accurate lip movements, proposing an audio-visual multimodal perceptual loss. This loss provides guidance to train the speech-driven 3D facial animators to generate plausible lip motions aligned with the spoken transcripts. Furthermore, to incorporate the proposed audio-visual perceptual loss, we devise an audio-visual lip reading expert leveraging its prior knowledge about correlations between speech and lip motions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through broad experiments, showing noticeable improvements in lip synchronization and lip readability performance. Codes are available at https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

We present V2M4, a novel 4D reconstruction method that directly generates a usable 4D mesh animation asset from a single monocular video. Unlike existing approaches that rely on priors from multi-view image and video generation models, our method is based on native 3D mesh generation models. Naively applying 3D mesh generation models to generate a mesh for each frame in a 4D task can lead to issues such as incorrect mesh poses, misalignment of mesh appearance, and inconsistencies in mesh geometry and texture maps. To address these problems, we propose a structured workflow that includes camera search and mesh reposing, condition embedding optimization for mesh appearance refinement, pairwise mesh registration for topology consistency, and global texture map optimization for texture consistency. Our method outputs high-quality 4D animated assets that are compatible with mainstream graphics and game software. Experimental results across a variety of animation types and motion amplitudes demonstrate the generalization and effectiveness of our method. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/V2M4/.

We present Attention Mesh, a lightweight architecture for 3D face mesh prediction that uses attention to semantically meaningful regions. Our neural network is designed for real-time on-device inference and runs at over 50 FPS on a Pixel 2 phone. Our solution enables applications like AR makeup, eye tracking and AR puppeteering that rely on highly accurate landmarks for eye and lips regions. Our main contribution is a unified network architecture that achieves the same accuracy on facial landmarks as a multi-stage cascaded approach, while being 30 percent faster.

Despite significant progress in single image-based 3D human mesh recovery, accurately and smoothly recovering 3D human motion from a video remains challenging. Existing video-based methods generally recover human mesh by estimating the complex pose and shape parameters from coupled image features, whose high complexity and low representation ability often result in inconsistent pose motion and limited shape patterns. To alleviate this issue, we introduce 3D pose as the intermediary and propose a Pose and Mesh Co-Evolution network (PMCE) that decouples this task into two parts: 1) video-based 3D human pose estimation and 2) mesh vertices regression from the estimated 3D pose and temporal image feature. Specifically, we propose a two-stream encoder that estimates mid-frame 3D pose and extracts a temporal image feature from the input image sequence. In addition, we design a co-evolution decoder that performs pose and mesh interactions with the image-guided Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN) to make pose and mesh fit the human body shape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PMCE outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of both per-frame accuracy and temporal consistency on three benchmark datasets: 3DPW, Human3.6M, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Our code is available at https://github.com/kasvii/PMCE.

Previous motion generation methods are limited to the pre-rigged 3D human model, hindering their applications in the animation of various non-rigged characters. In this work, we present TapMo, a Text-driven Animation Pipeline for synthesizing Motion in a broad spectrum of skeleton-free 3D characters. The pivotal innovation in TapMo is its use of shape deformation-aware features as a condition to guide the diffusion model, thereby enabling the generation of mesh-specific motions for various characters. Specifically, TapMo comprises two main components - Mesh Handle Predictor and Shape-aware Diffusion Module. Mesh Handle Predictor predicts the skinning weights and clusters mesh vertices into adaptive handles for deformation control, which eliminates the need for traditional skeletal rigging. Shape-aware Motion Diffusion synthesizes motion with mesh-specific adaptations. This module employs text-guided motions and mesh features extracted during the first stage, preserving the geometric integrity of the animations by accounting for the character's shape and deformation. Trained in a weakly-supervised manner, TapMo can accommodate a multitude of non-human meshes, both with and without associated text motions. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of TapMo through rigorous qualitative and quantitative experiments. Our results reveal that TapMo consistently outperforms existing auto-animation methods, delivering superior-quality animations for both seen or unseen heterogeneous 3D characters.

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D talking heads with controllable emotion, featuring enhanced lip synchronization and rendering quality. Despite significant progress in the field, prior methods still suffer from multi-view consistency and a lack of emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we collect EmoTalk3D dataset with calibrated multi-view videos, emotional annotations, and per-frame 3D geometry. By training on the EmoTalk3D dataset, we propose a `Speech-to-Geometry-to-Appearance' mapping framework that first predicts faithful 3D geometry sequence from the audio features, then the appearance of a 3D talking head represented by 4D Gaussians is synthesized from the predicted geometry. The appearance is further disentangled into canonical and dynamic Gaussians, learned from multi-view videos, and fused to render free-view talking head animation. Moreover, our model enables controllable emotion in the generated talking heads and can be rendered in wide-range views. Our method exhibits improved rendering quality and stability in lip motion generation while capturing dynamic facial details such as wrinkles and subtle expressions. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-fidelity and emotion-controllable 3D talking heads. The code and EmoTalk3D dataset are released at https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/EmoTalk3D.

We introduce RMAvatar, a novel human avatar representation with Gaussian splatting embedded on mesh to learn clothed avatar from a monocular video. We utilize the explicit mesh geometry to represent motion and shape of a virtual human and implicit appearance rendering with Gaussian Splatting. Our method consists of two main modules: Gaussian initialization module and Gaussian rectification module. We embed Gaussians into triangular faces and control their motion through the mesh, which ensures low-frequency motion and surface deformation of the avatar. Due to the limitations of LBS formula, the human skeleton is hard to control complex non-rigid transformations. We then design a pose-related Gaussian rectification module to learn fine-detailed non-rigid deformations, further improving the realism and expressiveness of the avatar. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets, RMAvatar shows state-of-the-art performance on both rendering quality and quantitative evaluations. Please see our project page at https://rm-avatar.github.io.

Image-based 3D reconstruction has increasingly stunning results over the past few years with the latest improvements in computer vision and graphics. Geometry and topology are two fundamental concepts when dealing with 3D mesh structures. But the latest often remains a side issue in the 3D mesh-based reconstruction literature. Indeed, performing per-vertex elementary displacements over a 3D sphere mesh only impacts its geometry and leaves the topological structure unchanged and fixed. Whereas few attempts propose to update the geometry and the topology, all need to lean on costly 3D ground-truth to determine the faces/edges to prune. We present in this work a method that aims to refine the topology of any 3D mesh through a face-pruning strategy that extensively relies upon 2D alpha masks and camera pose information. Our solution leverages a differentiable renderer that renders each face as a 2D soft map. Its pixel intensity reflects the probability of being covered during the rendering process by such a face. Based on the 2D soft-masks available, our method is thus able to quickly highlight all the incorrectly rendered faces for a given viewpoint. Because our module is agnostic to the network that produces the 3D mesh, it can be easily plugged into any self-supervised image-based (either synthetic or natural) 3D reconstruction pipeline to get complex meshes with a non-spherical topology.

High-fidelity reconstruction of 3D human avatars has a wild application in visual reality. In this paper, we introduce FAGhead, a method that enables fully controllable human portraits from monocular videos. We explicit the traditional 3D morphable meshes (3DMM) and optimize the neutral 3D Gaussians to reconstruct with complex expressions. Furthermore, we employ a novel Point-based Learnable Representation Field (PLRF) with learnable Gaussian point positions to enhance reconstruction performance. Meanwhile, to effectively manage the edges of avatars, we introduced the alpha rendering to supervise the alpha value of each pixel. Extensive experimental results on the open-source datasets and our capturing datasets demonstrate that our approach is able to generate high-fidelity 3D head avatars and fully control the expression and pose of the virtual avatars, which is outperforming than existing works.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic lip movements and facial expressions for 3D head models from arbitrary audio clips. Although existing diffusion-based methods are capable of producing natural motions, their slow generation speed limits their application potential. In this paper, we introduce a novel autoregressive model that achieves real-time generation of highly synchronized lip movements and realistic head poses and eye blinks by learning a mapping from speech to a multi-scale motion codebook. Furthermore, our model can adapt to unseen speaking styles using sample motion sequences, enabling the creation of 3D talking avatars with unique personal styles beyond the identities seen during training. Extensive evaluations and user studies demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in lip synchronization accuracy and perceived quality.

We present Gaussian Pixel Codec Avatars (GPiCA), photorealistic head avatars that can be generated from multi-view images and efficiently rendered on mobile devices. GPiCA utilizes a unique hybrid representation that combines a triangle mesh and anisotropic 3D Gaussians. This combination maximizes memory and rendering efficiency while maintaining a photorealistic appearance. The triangle mesh is highly efficient in representing surface areas like facial skin, while the 3D Gaussians effectively handle non-surface areas such as hair and beard. To this end, we develop a unified differentiable rendering pipeline that treats the mesh as a semi-transparent layer within the volumetric rendering paradigm of 3D Gaussian Splatting. We train neural networks to decode a facial expression code into three components: a 3D face mesh, an RGBA texture, and a set of 3D Gaussians. These components are rendered simultaneously in a unified rendering engine. The networks are trained using multi-view image supervision. Our results demonstrate that GPiCA achieves the realism of purely Gaussian-based avatars while matching the rendering performance of mesh-based avatars.

Accurate, real-time 3D reconstruction of human heads from monocular images and videos underlies numerous visual applications. As 3D ground truth data is hard to come by at scale, previous methods have sought to learn from abundant 2D videos in a self-supervised manner. Typically, this involves the use of differentiable mesh rendering, which is effective but faces limitations. To improve on this, we propose SHeaP (Self-supervised Head Geometry Predictor Learned via 2D Gaussians). Given a source image, we predict a 3DMM mesh and a set of Gaussians that are rigged to this mesh. We then reanimate this rigged head avatar to match a target frame, and backpropagate photometric losses to both the 3DMM and Gaussian prediction networks. We find that using Gaussians for rendering substantially improves the effectiveness of this self-supervised approach. Training solely on 2D data, our method surpasses existing self-supervised approaches in geometric evaluations on the NoW benchmark for neutral faces and a new benchmark for non-neutral expressions. Our method also produces highly expressive meshes, outperforming state-of-the-art in emotion classification.

Recent advancements in 2D/3D generative techniques have facilitated the generation of dynamic 3D objects from monocular videos. Previous methods mainly rely on the implicit neural radiance fields (NeRF) or explicit Gaussian Splatting as the underlying representation, and struggle to achieve satisfactory spatial-temporal consistency and surface appearance. Drawing inspiration from modern 3D animation pipelines, we introduce DreamMesh4D, a novel framework combining mesh representation with geometric skinning technique to generate high-quality 4D object from a monocular video. Instead of utilizing classical texture map for appearance, we bind Gaussian splats to triangle face of mesh for differentiable optimization of both the texture and mesh vertices. In particular, DreamMesh4D begins with a coarse mesh obtained through an image-to-3D generation procedure. Sparse points are then uniformly sampled across the mesh surface, and are used to build a deformation graph to drive the motion of the 3D object for the sake of computational efficiency and providing additional constraint. For each step, transformations of sparse control points are predicted using a deformation network, and the mesh vertices as well as the surface Gaussians are deformed via a novel geometric skinning algorithm, which is a hybrid approach combining LBS (linear blending skinning) and DQS (dual-quaternion skinning), mitigating drawbacks associated with both approaches. The static surface Gaussians and mesh vertices as well as the deformation network are learned via reference view photometric loss, score distillation loss as well as other regularizers in a two-stage manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of our method. Furthermore, our method is compatible with modern graphic pipelines, showcasing its potential in the 3D gaming and film industry.

We propose a method to learn a high-quality implicit 3D head avatar from a monocular RGB video captured in the wild. The learnt avatar is driven by a parametric face model to achieve user-controlled facial expressions and head poses. Our hybrid pipeline combines the geometry prior and dynamic tracking of a 3DMM with a neural radiance field to achieve fine-grained control and photorealism. To reduce over-smoothing and improve out-of-model expressions synthesis, we propose to predict local features anchored on the 3DMM geometry. These learnt features are driven by 3DMM deformation and interpolated in 3D space to yield the volumetric radiance at a designated query point. We further show that using a Convolutional Neural Network in the UV space is critical in incorporating spatial context and producing representative local features. Extensive experiments show that we are able to reconstruct high-quality avatars, with more accurate expression-dependent details, good generalization to out-of-training expressions, and quantitatively superior renderings compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, with applications in gaming, character animation, virtual reality, and telepresence systems. State-of-the-art methods deform the face topology of the target actor to sync the input audio without considering the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor, thus, resulting in unrealistic and inaccurate lip movements. To address this, we present Imitator, a speech-driven facial expression synthesis method, which learns identity-specific details from a short input video and produces novel facial expressions matching the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor. Specifically, we train a style-agnostic transformer on a large facial expression dataset which we use as a prior for audio-driven facial expressions. Based on this prior, we optimize for identity-specific speaking style based on a short reference video. To train the prior, we introduce a novel loss function based on detected bilabial consonants to ensure plausible lip closures and consequently improve the realism of the generated expressions. Through detailed experiments and a user study, we show that our approach produces temporally coherent facial expressions from input audio while preserving the speaking style of the target actors.

Generating animated 3D objects is at the heart of many applications, yet most advanced works are typically difficult to apply in practice because of their limited setup, their long runtime, or their limited quality. We introduce ActionMesh, a generative model that predicts production-ready 3D meshes "in action" in a feed-forward manner. Drawing inspiration from early video models, our key insight is to modify existing 3D diffusion models to include a temporal axis, resulting in a framework we dubbed "temporal 3D diffusion". Specifically, we first adapt the 3D diffusion stage to generate a sequence of synchronized latents representing time-varying and independent 3D shapes. Second, we design a temporal 3D autoencoder that translates a sequence of independent shapes into the corresponding deformations of a pre-defined reference shape, allowing us to build an animation. Combining these two components, ActionMesh generates animated 3D meshes from different inputs like a monocular video, a text description, or even a 3D mesh with a text prompt describing its animation. Besides, compared to previous approaches, our method is fast and produces results that are rig-free and topology consistent, hence enabling rapid iteration and seamless applications like texturing and retargeting. We evaluate our model on standard video-to-4D benchmarks (Consistent4D, Objaverse) and report state-of-the-art performances on both geometric accuracy and temporal consistency, demonstrating that our model can deliver animated 3D meshes with unprecedented speed and quality.

We propose Mesh4D, a feed-forward model for monocular 4D mesh reconstruction. Given a monocular video of a dynamic object, our model reconstructs the object's complete 3D shape and motion, represented as a deformation field. Our key contribution is a compact latent space that encodes the entire animation sequence in a single pass. This latent space is learned by an autoencoder that, during training, is guided by the skeletal structure of the training objects, providing strong priors on plausible deformations. Crucially, skeletal information is not required at inference time. The encoder employs spatio-temporal attention, yielding a more stable representation of the object's overall deformation. Building on this representation, we train a latent diffusion model that, conditioned on the input video and the mesh reconstructed from the first frame, predicts the full animation in one shot. We evaluate Mesh4D on reconstruction and novel view synthesis benchmarks, outperforming prior methods in recovering accurate 3D shape and deformation.

3D head avatars built with neural implicit volumetric representations have achieved unprecedented levels of photorealism. However, the computational cost of these methods remains a significant barrier to their widespread adoption, particularly in real-time applications such as virtual reality and teleconferencing. While attempts have been made to develop fast neural rendering approaches for static scenes, these methods cannot be simply employed to support realistic facial expressions, such as in the case of a dynamic facial performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel fast 3D neural implicit head avatar model that achieves real-time rendering while maintaining fine-grained controllability and high rendering quality. Our key idea lies in the introduction of local hash table blendshapes, which are learned and attached to the vertices of an underlying face parametric model. These per-vertex hash-tables are linearly merged with weights predicted via a CNN, resulting in expression dependent embeddings. Our novel representation enables efficient density and color predictions using a lightweight MLP, which is further accelerated by a hierarchical nearest neighbor search method. Extensive experiments show that our approach runs in real-time while achieving comparable rendering quality to state-of-the-arts and decent results on challenging expressions.

There is a growing demand for the accessible creation of high-quality 3D avatars that are animatable and customizable. Although 3D morphable models provide intuitive control for editing and animation, and robustness for single-view face reconstruction, they cannot easily capture geometric and appearance details. Methods based on neural implicit representations, such as signed distance functions (SDF) or neural radiance fields, approach photo-realism, but are difficult to animate and do not generalize well to unseen data. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method for constructing implicit 3D morphable face models that are both generalizable and intuitive for editing. Trained from a collection of high-quality 3D scans, our face model is parameterized by geometry, expression, and texture latent codes with a learned SDF and explicit UV texture parameterization. Once trained, we can reconstruct an avatar from a single in-the-wild image by leveraging the learned prior to project the image into the latent space of our model. Our implicit morphable face models can be used to render an avatar from novel views, animate facial expressions by modifying expression codes, and edit textures by directly painting on the learned UV-texture maps. We demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our method improves upon photo-realism, geometry, and expression accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.

We present an end-to-end neural network-based model for inferring an approximate 3D mesh representation of a human face from single camera input for AR applications. The relatively dense mesh model of 468 vertices is well-suited for face-based AR effects. The proposed model demonstrates super-realtime inference speed on mobile GPUs (100-1000+ FPS, depending on the device and model variant) and a high prediction quality that is comparable to the variance in manual annotations of the same image.

One-shot 3D talking portrait generation aims to reconstruct a 3D avatar from an unseen image, and then animate it with a reference video or audio to generate a talking portrait video. The existing methods fail to simultaneously achieve the goals of accurate 3D avatar reconstruction and stable talking face animation. Besides, while the existing works mainly focus on synthesizing the head part, it is also vital to generate natural torso and background segments to obtain a realistic talking portrait video. To address these limitations, we present Real3D-Potrait, a framework that (1) improves the one-shot 3D reconstruction power with a large image-to-plane model that distills 3D prior knowledge from a 3D face generative model; (2) facilitates accurate motion-conditioned animation with an efficient motion adapter; (3) synthesizes realistic video with natural torso movement and switchable background using a head-torso-background super-resolution model; and (4) supports one-shot audio-driven talking face generation with a generalizable audio-to-motion model. Extensive experiments show that Real3D-Portrait generalizes well to unseen identities and generates more realistic talking portrait videos compared to previous methods. Video samples and source code are available at https://real3dportrait.github.io .

State-of-the-art text-to-motion generation models rely on the kinematic-aware, local-relative motion representation popularized by HumanML3D, which encodes motion relative to the pelvis and to the previous frame with built-in redundancy. While this design simplifies training for earlier generation models, it introduces critical limitations for diffusion models and hinders applicability to downstream tasks. In this work, we revisit the motion representation and propose a radically simplified and long-abandoned alternative for text-to-motion generation: absolute joint coordinates in global space. Through systematic analysis of design choices, we show that this formulation achieves significantly higher motion fidelity, improved text alignment, and strong scalability, even with a simple Transformer backbone and no auxiliary kinematic-aware losses. Moreover, our formulation naturally supports downstream tasks such as text-driven motion control and temporal/spatial editing without additional task-specific reengineering and costly classifier guidance generation from control signals. Finally, we demonstrate promising generalization to directly generate SMPL-H mesh vertices in motion from text, laying a strong foundation for future research and motion-related applications.

This paper presents a Surface-Aligned Gaussian representation for creating animatable human avatars from monocular videos,aiming at improving the novel view and pose synthesis performance while ensuring fast training and real-time rendering. Recently,3DGS has emerged as a more efficient and expressive alternative to NeRF, and has been used for creating dynamic human avatars. However,when applied to the severely ill-posed task of monocular dynamic reconstruction, the Gaussians tend to overfit the constantly changing regions such as clothes wrinkles or shadows since these regions cannot provide consistent supervision, resulting in noisy geometry and abrupt deformation that typically fail to generalize under novel views and poses.To address these limitations, we present SAGA,i.e.,Surface-Aligned Gaussian Avatar,which aligns the Gaussians with a mesh to enforce well-defined geometry and consistent deformation, thereby improving generalization under novel views and poses. Unlike existing strict alignment methods that suffer from limited expressive power and low realism,SAGA employs a two-stage alignment strategy where the Gaussians are first adhered on while then detached from the mesh, thus facilitating both good geometry and high expressivity. In the Adhered Stage, we improve the flexibility of Adhered-on-Mesh Gaussians by allowing them to flow on the mesh, in contrast to existing methods that rigidly bind Gaussians to fixed location. In the second Detached Stage, we introduce a Gaussian-Mesh Alignment regularization, which allows us to unleash the expressivity by detaching the Gaussians but maintain the geometric alignment by minimizing their location and orientation offsets from the bound triangles. Finally, since the Gaussians may drift outside the bound triangles during optimization, an efficient Walking-on-Mesh strategy is proposed to dynamically update the bound triangles.

Generating faithful visualizations of human faces requires capturing both coarse and fine-level details of the face geometry and appearance. Existing methods are either data-driven, requiring an extensive corpus of data not publicly accessible to the research community, or fail to capture fine details because they rely on geometric face models that cannot represent fine-grained details in texture with a mesh discretization and linear deformation designed to model only a coarse face geometry. We introduce a method that bridges this gap by drawing inspiration from traditional computer graphics techniques. Unseen expressions are modeled by blending appearance from a sparse set of extreme poses. This blending is performed by measuring local volumetric changes in those expressions and locally reproducing their appearance whenever a similar expression is performed at test time. We show that our method generalizes to unseen expressions, adding fine-grained effects on top of smooth volumetric deformations of a face, and demonstrate how it generalizes beyond faces.

Existing methods of 3D dense face alignment mainly concentrate on accuracy, thus limiting the scope of their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel regression framework named 3DDFA-V2 which makes a balance among speed, accuracy and stability. Firstly, on the basis of a lightweight backbone, we propose a meta-joint optimization strategy to dynamically regress a small set of 3DMM parameters, which greatly enhances speed and accuracy simultaneously. To further improve the stability on videos, we present a virtual synthesis method to transform one still image to a short-video which incorporates in-plane and out-of-plane face moving. On the premise of high accuracy and stability, 3DDFA-V2 runs at over 50fps on a single CPU core and outperforms other state-of-the-art heavy models simultaneously. Experiments on several challenging datasets validate the efficiency of our method. Pre-trained models and code are available at https://github.com/cleardusk/3DDFA_V2.

We present a method to build animatable dog avatars from monocular videos. This is challenging as animals display a range of (unpredictable) non-rigid movements and have a variety of appearance details (e.g., fur, spots, tails). We develop an approach that links the video frames via a 4D solution that jointly solves for animal's pose variation, and its appearance (in a canonical pose). To this end, we significantly improve the quality of template-based shape fitting by endowing the SMAL parametric model with Continuous Surface Embeddings, which brings image-to-mesh reprojection constaints that are denser, and thus stronger, than the previously used sparse semantic keypoint correspondences. To model appearance, we propose an implicit duplex-mesh texture that is defined in the canonical pose, but can be deformed using SMAL pose coefficients and later rendered to enforce a photometric compatibility with the input video frames. On the challenging CoP3D and APTv2 datasets, we demonstrate superior results (both in terms of pose estimates and predicted appearance) to existing template-free (RAC) and template-based approaches (BARC, BITE).

Handle-based mesh deformation is a classic paradigm in computer graphics which enables intuitive edits from sparse controls. Classical techniques are fast and precise, but require users to know ideal handle placement apriori, which can be unintuitive and inconsistent. Handle sets cannot be adjusted easily, as weights are typically optimized through energies defined by the handles. Modern data-driven methods, on the other hand, provide semantic edits but sacrifice fine-grained control and speed. We propose a technique that achieves the best of both worlds: deep feature proximity yields smooth, visual-aware deformation weights with no additional regularization. Importantly, these weights are computed in real-time for any surface point, unlike prior methods which require expensive optimization. We introduce barycentric feature distillation, an improved feature distillation pipeline which leverages the full visual signal from shape renders to make distillation complexity robust to mesh resolution. This enables high resolution meshes to be processed in minutes versus potentially hours for prior methods. We preserve and extend classical properties through feature space constraints and locality weighting. Our field representation enables automatic visual symmetry detection, which we use to produce symmetry-preserving deformations. We show a proof-of-concept application which can produce deformations for meshes up to 1 million faces in real-time on a consumer-grade machine. Project page at https://threedle.github.io/dfd.

4D head capture aims to generate dynamic topological meshes and corresponding texture maps from videos, which is widely utilized in movies and games for its ability to simulate facial muscle movements and recover dynamic textures in pore-squeezing. The industry often adopts the method involving multi-view stereo and non-rigid alignment. However, this approach is prone to errors and heavily reliant on time-consuming manual processing by artists. To simplify this process, we propose Topo4D, a novel framework for automatic geometry and texture generation, which optimizes densely aligned 4D heads and 8K texture maps directly from calibrated multi-view time-series images. Specifically, we first represent the time-series faces as a set of dynamic 3D Gaussians with fixed topology in which the Gaussian centers are bound to the mesh vertices. Afterward, we perform alternative geometry and texture optimization frame-by-frame for high-quality geometry and texture learning while maintaining temporal topology stability. Finally, we can extract dynamic facial meshes in regular wiring arrangement and high-fidelity textures with pore-level details from the learned Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior results than the current SOTA face reconstruction methods both in the quality of meshes and textures. Project page: https://xuanchenli.github.io/Topo4D/.

Diffusion-based video generation techniques have significantly improved zero-shot talking-head avatar generation, enhancing the naturalness of both head motion and facial expressions. However, existing methods suffer from poor controllability, making them less applicable to real-world scenarios such as filmmaking and live streaming for e-commerce. To address this limitation, we propose FLAP, a novel approach that integrates explicit 3D intermediate parameters (head poses and facial expressions) into the diffusion model for end-to-end generation of realistic portrait videos. The proposed architecture allows the model to generate vivid portrait videos from audio while simultaneously incorporating additional control signals, such as head rotation angles and eye-blinking frequency. Furthermore, the decoupling of head pose and facial expression allows for independent control of each, offering precise manipulation of both the avatar's pose and facial expressions. We also demonstrate its flexibility in integrating with existing 3D head generation methods, bridging the gap between 3D model-based approaches and end-to-end diffusion techniques. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms recent audio-driven portrait video models in both naturalness and controllability.

We present As-Plausible-as-Possible (APAP) mesh deformation technique that leverages 2D diffusion priors to preserve the plausibility of a mesh under user-controlled deformation. Our framework uses per-face Jacobians to represent mesh deformations, where mesh vertex coordinates are computed via a differentiable Poisson Solve. The deformed mesh is rendered, and the resulting 2D image is used in the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) process, which enables extracting meaningful plausibility priors from a pretrained 2D diffusion model. To better preserve the identity of the edited mesh, we fine-tune our 2D diffusion model with LoRA. Gradients extracted by SDS and a user-prescribed handle displacement are then backpropagated to the per-face Jacobians, and we use iterative gradient descent to compute the final deformation that balances between the user edit and the output plausibility. We evaluate our method with 2D and 3D meshes and demonstrate qualitative and quantitative improvements when using plausibility priors over geometry-preservation or distortion-minimization priors used by previous techniques. Our project page is at: https://as-plausible-aspossible.github.io/

Talking head video generation aims to produce a synthetic human face video that contains the identity and pose information respectively from a given source image and a driving video.Existing works for this task heavily rely on 2D representations (e.g. appearance and motion) learned from the input images. However, dense 3D facial geometry (e.g. pixel-wise depth) is extremely important for this task as it is particularly beneficial for us to essentially generate accurate 3D face structures and distinguish noisy information from the possibly cluttered background. Nevertheless, dense 3D geometry annotations are prohibitively costly for videos and are typically not available for this video generation task. In this paper, we first introduce a self-supervised geometry learning method to automatically recover the dense 3D geometry (i.e.depth) from the face videos without the requirement of any expensive 3D annotation data. Based on the learned dense depth maps, we further propose to leverage them to estimate sparse facial keypoints that capture the critical movement of the human head. In a more dense way, the depth is also utilized to learn 3D-aware cross-modal (i.e. appearance and depth) attention to guide the generation of motion fields for warping source image representations. All these contributions compose a novel depth-aware generative adversarial network (DaGAN) for talking head generation. Extensive experiments conducted demonstrate that our proposed method can generate highly realistic faces, and achieve significant results on the unseen human faces.

Although neural rendering has made significant advances in creating lifelike, animatable full-body and head avatars, incorporating detailed expressions into full-body avatars remains largely unexplored. We present DEGAS, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based modeling method for full-body avatars with rich facial expressions. Trained on multiview videos of a given subject, our method learns a conditional variational autoencoder that takes both the body motion and facial expression as driving signals to generate Gaussian maps in the UV layout. To drive the facial expressions, instead of the commonly used 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) in 3D head avatars, we propose to adopt the expression latent space trained solely on 2D portrait images, bridging the gap between 2D talking faces and 3D avatars. Leveraging the rendering capability of 3DGS and the rich expressiveness of the expression latent space, the learned avatars can be reenacted to reproduce photorealistic rendering images with subtle and accurate facial expressions. Experiments on an existing dataset and our newly proposed dataset of full-body talking avatars demonstrate the efficacy of our method. We also propose an audio-driven extension of our method with the help of 2D talking faces, opening new possibilities for interactive AI agents.

Reconstructing photo-realistic drivable human avatars from multi-view image sequences has been a popular and challenging topic in the field of computer vision and graphics. While existing NeRF-based methods can achieve high-quality novel view rendering of human models, both training and inference processes are time-consuming. Recent approaches have utilized 3D Gaussians to represent the human body, enabling faster training and rendering. However, they undermine the importance of the mesh guidance and directly predict Gaussians in 3D space with coarse mesh guidance. This hinders the learning procedure of the Gaussians and tends to produce blurry textures. Therefore, we propose UV Gaussians, which models the 3D human body by jointly learning mesh deformations and 2D UV-space Gaussian textures. We utilize the embedding of UV map to learn Gaussian textures in 2D space, leveraging the capabilities of powerful 2D networks to extract features. Additionally, through an independent Mesh network, we optimize pose-dependent geometric deformations, thereby guiding Gaussian rendering and significantly enhancing rendering quality. We collect and process a new dataset of human motion, which includes multi-view images, scanned models, parametric model registration, and corresponding texture maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art synthesis of novel view and novel pose. The code and data will be made available on the homepage https://alex-jyj.github.io/UV-Gaussians/ once the paper is accepted.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims at generating facial movements that are synchronized with the driving speech, which has been widely explored recently. Existing works mostly neglect the person-specific talking style in generation, including facial expression and head pose styles. Several works intend to capture the personalities by fine-tuning modules. However, limited training data leads to the lack of vividness. In this work, we propose AdaMesh, a novel adaptive speech-driven facial animation approach, which learns the personalized talking style from a reference video of about 10 seconds and generates vivid facial expressions and head poses. Specifically, we propose mixture-of-low-rank adaptation (MoLoRA) to fine-tune the expression adapter, which efficiently captures the facial expression style. For the personalized pose style, we propose a pose adapter by building a discrete pose prior and retrieving the appropriate style embedding with a semantic-aware pose style matrix without fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, preserves the talking style in the reference video, and generates vivid facial animation. The supplementary video and code will be available at https://adamesh.github.io.

Recent advances in 4D content generation have attracted increasing attention, yet creating high-quality animated 3D models remains challenging due to the complexity of modeling spatio-temporal distributions and the scarcity of 4D training data. In this paper, we present AnimateAnyMesh, the first feed-forward framework that enables efficient text-driven animation of arbitrary 3D meshes. Our approach leverages a novel DyMeshVAE architecture that effectively compresses and reconstructs dynamic mesh sequences by disentangling spatial and temporal features while preserving local topological structures. To enable high-quality text-conditional generation, we employ a Rectified Flow-based training strategy in the compressed latent space. Additionally, we contribute the DyMesh Dataset, containing over 4M diverse dynamic mesh sequences with text annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates semantically accurate and temporally coherent mesh animations in a few seconds, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both quality and efficiency. Our work marks a substantial step forward in making 4D content creation more accessible and practical. All the data, code, and models will be open-released.

Existing full-body Gaussian avatar methods primarily optimize global reconstruction quality and often fail to preserve fine-grained facial geometry and expression details. This challenge arises from limited facial representational capacity that causes difficulties in modeling high-frequency pose-dependent deformations. To address this, we propose F3G-Avatar, a full-body, face-aware avatar synthesis method that reconstructs animatable human representations from multi-view RGB video and regressed pose/shape parameters. Starting from a clothed Momentum Human Rig (MHR) template, front/back positional maps are rendered and decoded into 3D Gaussians through a two-branch architecture: a body branch that captures pose-dependent non-rigid deformations and a face-focused deformation branch that refines head geometry and appearance. The predicted Gaussians are fused, posed with linear blend skinning (LBS), and rendered with differentiable Gaussian splatting. Training combines reconstruction and perceptual objectives with a face-specific adversarial loss to enhance realism in close-up views. Experiments demonstrate strong rendering quality, with face-view performance reaching PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS of 26.243/0.964/0.084 on the AvatarReX dataset. Ablations further highlight contributions of the MHR template and the face-focused deformation. F3G-Avatar provides a practical, high-quality pipeline for realistic, animatable full-body avatar synthesis.

This paper addresses the problem of single view 3D human reconstruction. Recent implicit function based methods have shown impressive results, but they fail to recover fine face details in their reconstructions. This largely degrades user experience in applications like 3D telepresence. In this paper, we focus on improving the quality of face in the reconstruction and propose a novel Jointly-aligned Implicit Face Function (JIFF) that combines the merits of the implicit function based approach and model based approach. We employ a 3D morphable face model as our shape prior and compute space-aligned 3D features that capture detailed face geometry information. Such space-aligned 3D features are combined with pixel-aligned 2D features to jointly predict an implicit face function for high quality face reconstruction. We further extend our pipeline and introduce a coarse-to-fine architecture to predict high quality texture for our detailed face model. Extensive evaluations have been carried out on public datasets and our proposed JIFF has demonstrates superior performance (both quantitatively and qualitatively) over existing state-of-the-arts.

We present HeadEvolver, a novel framework to generate stylized head avatars from text guidance. HeadEvolver uses locally learnable mesh deformation from a template head mesh, producing high-quality digital assets for detail-preserving editing and animation. To tackle the challenges of lacking fine-grained and semantic-aware local shape control in global deformation through Jacobians, we introduce a trainable parameter as a weighting factor for the Jacobian at each triangle to adaptively change local shapes while maintaining global correspondences and facial features. Moreover, to ensure the coherence of the resulting shape and appearance from different viewpoints, we use pretrained image diffusion models for differentiable rendering with regularization terms to refine the deformation under text guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate diverse head avatars with an articulated mesh that can be edited seamlessly in 3D graphics software, facilitating downstream applications such as more efficient animation with inherited blend shapes and semantic consistency.

High-fidelity and efficient audio-driven talking head generation has been a key research topic in computer graphics and computer vision. In this work, we study vector image based audio-driven talking head generation. Compared with directly animating the raster image that most widely used in existing works, vector image enjoys its excellent scalability being used for many applications. There are two main challenges for vector image based talking head generation: the high-quality vector image reconstruction w.r.t. the source portrait image and the vivid animation w.r.t. the audio signal. To address these, we propose a novel scalable vector graphic reconstruction and animation method, dubbed VectorTalker. Specifically, for the highfidelity reconstruction, VectorTalker hierarchically reconstructs the vector image in a coarse-to-fine manner. For the vivid audio-driven facial animation, we propose to use facial landmarks as intermediate motion representation and propose an efficient landmark-driven vector image deformation module. Our approach can handle various styles of portrait images within a unified framework, including Japanese manga, cartoon, and photorealistic images. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of VectorTalker in both vector graphic reconstruction and audio-driven animation.

Audio-driven talking head generation has drawn much attention in recent years, and many efforts have been made in lip-sync, expressive facial expressions, natural head pose generation, and high video quality. However, no model has yet led or tied on all these metrics due to the one-to-many mapping between audio and motion. In this paper, we propose VividTalk, a two-stage generic framework that supports generating high-visual quality talking head videos with all the above properties. Specifically, in the first stage, we map the audio to mesh by learning two motions, including non-rigid expression motion and rigid head motion. For expression motion, both blendshape and vertex are adopted as the intermediate representation to maximize the representation ability of the model. For natural head motion, a novel learnable head pose codebook with a two-phase training mechanism is proposed. In the second stage, we proposed a dual branch motion-vae and a generator to transform the meshes into dense motion and synthesize high-quality video frame-by-frame. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VividTalk can generate high-visual quality talking head videos with lip-sync and realistic enhanced by a large margin, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art works in objective and subjective comparisons.

Polygon meshes are an efficient representation of 3D geometry, and are of central importance in computer graphics, robotics and games development. Existing learning-based approaches have avoided the challenges of working with 3D meshes, instead using alternative object representations that are more compatible with neural architectures and training approaches. We present an approach which models the mesh directly, predicting mesh vertices and faces sequentially using a Transformer-based architecture. Our model can condition on a range of inputs, including object classes, voxels, and images, and because the model is probabilistic it can produce samples that capture uncertainty in ambiguous scenarios. We show that the model is capable of producing high-quality, usable meshes, and establish log-likelihood benchmarks for the mesh-modelling task. We also evaluate the conditional models on surface reconstruction metrics against alternative methods, and demonstrate competitive performance despite not training directly on this task.

3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) provide promising 3D face reconstructions in various applications. However, existing methods struggle to reconstruct faces with extreme expressions due to deficiencies in supervisory signals, such as sparse or inaccurate landmarks. Segmentation information contains effective geometric contexts for face reconstruction. Certain attempts intuitively depend on differentiable renderers to compare the rendered silhouettes of reconstruction with segmentation, which is prone to issues like local optima and gradient instability. In this paper, we fully utilize the facial part segmentation geometry by introducing Part Re-projection Distance Loss (PRDL). Specifically, PRDL transforms facial part segmentation into 2D points and re-projects the reconstruction onto the image plane. Subsequently, by introducing grid anchors and computing different statistical distances from these anchors to the point sets, PRDL establishes geometry descriptors to optimize the distribution of the point sets for face reconstruction. PRDL exhibits a clear gradient compared to the renderer-based methods and presents state-of-the-art reconstruction performance in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our project is available at https://github.com/wang-zidu/3DDFA-V3 .

Creating high-fidelity 3D human head avatars is crucial for applications in VR/AR, telepresence, digital human interfaces, and film production. Recent advances have leveraged morphable face models to generate animated head avatars from easily accessible data, representing varying identities and expressions within a low-dimensional parametric space. However, existing methods often struggle with modeling complex appearance details, e.g., hairstyles and accessories, and suffer from low rendering quality and efficiency. This paper introduces a novel approach, 3D Gaussian Parametric Head Model, which employs 3D Gaussians to accurately represent the complexities of the human head, allowing precise control over both identity and expression. Additionally, it enables seamless face portrait interpolation and the reconstruction of detailed head avatars from a single image. Unlike previous methods, the Gaussian model can handle intricate details, enabling realistic representations of varying appearances and complex expressions. Furthermore, this paper presents a well-designed training framework to ensure smooth convergence, providing a guarantee for learning the rich content. Our method achieves high-quality, photo-realistic rendering with real-time efficiency, making it a valuable contribution to the field of parametric head models.

Creating high-fidelity 3D head avatars has always been a research hotspot, but there remains a great challenge under lightweight sparse view setups. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Head Avatar represented by controllable 3D Gaussians for high-fidelity head avatar modeling. We optimize the neutral 3D Gaussians and a fully learned MLP-based deformation field to capture complex expressions. The two parts benefit each other, thereby our method can model fine-grained dynamic details while ensuring expression accuracy. Furthermore, we devise a well-designed geometry-guided initialization strategy based on implicit SDF and Deep Marching Tetrahedra for the stability and convergence of the training procedure. Experiments show our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art sparse-view methods, achieving ultra high-fidelity rendering quality at 2K resolution even under exaggerated expressions.

Building realistic and animatable avatars still requires minutes of multi-view or monocular self-rotating videos, and most methods lack precise control over gestures and expressions. To push this boundary, we address the challenge of constructing a whole-body talking avatar from a single image. We propose a novel pipeline that tackles two critical issues: 1) complex dynamic modeling and 2) generalization to novel gestures and expressions. To achieve seamless generalization, we leverage recent pose-guided image-to-video diffusion models to generate imperfect video frames as pseudo-labels. To overcome the dynamic modeling challenge posed by inconsistent and noisy pseudo-videos, we introduce a tightly coupled 3DGS-mesh hybrid avatar representation and apply several key regularizations to mitigate inconsistencies caused by imperfect labels. Extensive experiments on diverse subjects demonstrate that our method enables the creation of a photorealistic, precisely animatable, and expressive whole-body talking avatar from just a single image.

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

The research fields of parametric face models and 3D face reconstruction have been extensively studied. However, a critical question remains unanswered: how to tailor the face model for specific reconstruction settings. We argue that reconstruction with multi-view uncalibrated images demands a new model with stronger capacity. Our study shifts attention from data-dependent 3D Morphable Models (3DMM) to an understudied human-designed skinning model. We propose Adaptive Skinning Model (ASM), which redefines the skinning model with more compact and fully tunable parameters. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ASM achieves significantly improved capacity than 3DMM, with the additional advantage of model size and easy implementation for new topology. We achieve state-of-the-art performance with ASM for multi-view reconstruction on the Florence MICC Coop benchmark. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates the importance of a high-capacity model for fully exploiting abundant information from multi-view input in reconstruction. Furthermore, our model with physical-semantic parameters can be directly utilized for real-world applications, such as in-game avatar creation. As a result, our work opens up new research directions for the parametric face models and facilitates future research on multi-view reconstruction.

Real-time face orientation recognition is a cutting-edge technology meant to track and analyze facial movements in virtual environments such as online interviews, remote meetings, and virtual classrooms. As the demand for virtual interactions grows, it becomes increasingly important to measure participant engagement, attention, and overall interaction. This research presents a novel solution that leverages the Media Pipe Face Mesh framework to identify facial landmarks and extract geometric data for calculating Euler angles, which determine head orientation in real time. The system tracks 3D facial landmarks and uses this data to compute head movements with a focus on accuracy and responsiveness. By studying Euler angles, the system can identify a user's head orientation with an accuracy of 90\%, even at a distance of up to four feet. This capability offers significant enhancements for monitoring user interaction, allowing for more immersive and interactive virtual ex-periences. The proposed method shows its reliability in evaluating participant attentiveness during online assessments and meetings. Its application goes beyond engagement analysis, potentially providing a means for improving the quality of virtual communication, fostering better understanding between participants, and ensuring a higher level of interaction in digital spaces. This study offers a basis for future developments in enhancing virtual user experiences by integrating real-time facial tracking technologies, paving the way for more adaptive and interactive web-based platform.

Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.

Generating talking head videos through a face image and a piece of speech audio still contains many challenges. ie, unnatural head movement, distorted expression, and identity modification. We argue that these issues are mainly because of learning from the coupled 2D motion fields. On the other hand, explicitly using 3D information also suffers problems of stiff expression and incoherent video. We present SadTalker, which generates 3D motion coefficients (head pose, expression) of the 3DMM from audio and implicitly modulates a novel 3D-aware face render for talking head generation. To learn the realistic motion coefficients, we explicitly model the connections between audio and different types of motion coefficients individually. Precisely, we present ExpNet to learn the accurate facial expression from audio by distilling both coefficients and 3D-rendered faces. As for the head pose, we design PoseVAE via a conditional VAE to synthesize head motion in different styles. Finally, the generated 3D motion coefficients are mapped to the unsupervised 3D keypoints space of the proposed face render, and synthesize the final video. We conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of motion and video quality.

Constructing drivable and photorealistic 3D head avatars has become a central task in AR/XR, enabling immersive and expressive user experiences. With the emergence of high-fidelity and efficient representations such as 3D Gaussians, recent works have pushed toward ultra-detailed head avatars. Existing approaches typically fall into two categories: rule-based analytic rigging or neural network-based deformation fields. While effective in constrained settings, both approaches often fail to generalize to unseen expressions and poses, particularly in extreme reenactment scenarios. Other methods constrain Gaussians to the global texel space of 3DMMs to reduce rendering complexity. However, these texel-based avatars tend to underutilize the underlying mesh structure. They apply minimal analytic deformation and rely heavily on neural regressors and heuristic regularization in UV space, which weakens geometric consistency and limits extrapolation to complex, out-of-distribution deformations. To address these limitations, we introduce TexAvatars, a hybrid avatar representation that combines the explicit geometric grounding of analytic rigging with the spatial continuity of texel space. Our approach predicts local geometric attributes in UV space via CNNs, but drives 3D deformation through mesh-aware Jacobians, enabling smooth and semantically meaningful transitions across triangle boundaries. This hybrid design separates semantic modeling from geometric control, resulting in improved generalization, interpretability, and stability. Furthermore, TexAvatars captures fine-grained expression effects, including muscle-induced wrinkles, glabellar lines, and realistic mouth cavity geometry, with high fidelity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under extreme pose and expression variations, demonstrating strong generalization in challenging head reenactment settings.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation is challenging due to the complex geometry of human faces and the limited availability of 3D audio-visual data. Prior works typically focus on learning phoneme-level features of short audio windows with limited context, occasionally resulting in inaccurate lip movements. To tackle this limitation, we propose a Transformer-based autoregressive model, FaceFormer, which encodes the long-term audio context and autoregressively predicts a sequence of animated 3D face meshes. To cope with the data scarcity issue, we integrate the self-supervised pre-trained speech representations. Also, we devise two biased attention mechanisms well suited to this specific task, including the biased cross-modal multi-head (MH) attention and the biased causal MH self-attention with a periodic positional encoding strategy. The former effectively aligns the audio-motion modalities, whereas the latter offers abilities to generalize to longer audio sequences. Extensive experiments and a perceptual user study show that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-arts. The code will be made available.

The synthesis of 3D facial animations from speech has garnered considerable attention. Due to the scarcity of high-quality 4D facial data and well-annotated abundant multi-modality labels, previous methods often suffer from limited realism and a lack of lexible conditioning. We address this challenge through a trilogy. We first introduce Generalized Neural Parametric Facial Asset (GNPFA), an efficient variational auto-encoder mapping facial geometry and images to a highly generalized expression latent space, decoupling expressions and identities. Then, we utilize GNPFA to extract high-quality expressions and accurate head poses from a large array of videos. This presents the M2F-D dataset, a large, diverse, and scan-level co-speech 3D facial animation dataset with well-annotated emotional and style labels. Finally, we propose Media2Face, a diffusion model in GNPFA latent space for co-speech facial animation generation, accepting rich multi-modality guidances from audio, text, and image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only achieves high fidelity in facial animation synthesis but also broadens the scope of expressiveness and style adaptability in 3D facial animation.

We propose a 3D generation pipeline that uses diffusion models to generate realistic human digital avatars. Due to the wide variety of human identities, poses, and stochastic details, the generation of 3D human meshes has been a challenging problem. To address this, we decompose the problem into 2D normal map generation and normal map-based 3D reconstruction. Specifically, we first simultaneously generate realistic normal maps for the front and backside of a clothed human, dubbed dual normal maps, using a pose-conditional diffusion model. For 3D reconstruction, we ``carve'' the prior SMPL-X mesh to a detailed 3D mesh according to the normal maps through mesh optimization. To further enhance the high-frequency details, we present a diffusion resampling scheme on both body and facial regions, thus encouraging the generation of realistic digital avatars. We also seamlessly incorporate a recent text-to-image diffusion model to support text-based human identity control. Our method, namely, Chupa, is capable of generating realistic 3D clothed humans with better perceptual quality and identity variety.

Image alignment by mesh warps, such as meshflow, is a fundamental task which has been widely applied in various vision applications(e.g., multi-frame HDR/denoising, video stabilization). Traditional mesh warp methods detect and match image features, where the quality of alignment highly depends on the quality of image features. However, the image features are not robust in occurrence of low-texture and low-light scenes. Deep homography methods, on the other hand, are free from such problem by learning deep features for robust performance. However, a homography is limited to plane motions. In this work, we present a deep meshflow motion model, which takes two images as input and output a sparse motion field with motions located at mesh vertexes. The deep meshflow enjoys the merics of meshflow that can describe nonlinear motions while also shares advantage of deep homography that is robust against challenging textureless scenarios. In particular, a new unsupervised network structure is presented with content-adaptive capability. On one hand, the image content that cannot be aligned under mesh representation are rejected by our learned mask, similar to the RANSAC procedure. On the other hand, we learn multiple mesh resolutions, combining to a non-uniform mesh division. Moreover, a comprehensive dataset is presented, covering various scenes for training and testing. The comparison between both traditional mesh warp methods and deep based methods show the effectiveness of our deep meshflow motion model.

Inspired by the effectiveness of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) in reconstructing detailed 3D scenes within multi-view setups and the emergence of large 2D human foundation models, we introduce Arc2Avatar, the first SDS-based method utilizing a human face foundation model as guidance with just a single image as input. To achieve that, we extend such a model for diverse-view human head generation by fine-tuning on synthetic data and modifying its conditioning. Our avatars maintain a dense correspondence with a human face mesh template, allowing blendshape-based expression generation. This is achieved through a modified 3DGS approach, connectivity regularizers, and a strategic initialization tailored for our task. Additionally, we propose an optional efficient SDS-based correction step to refine the blendshape expressions, enhancing realism and diversity. Experiments demonstrate that Arc2Avatar achieves state-of-the-art realism and identity preservation, effectively addressing color issues by allowing the use of very low guidance, enabled by our strong identity prior and initialization strategy, without compromising detail. Please visit https://arc2avatar.github.io for more resources.

Creating realistic 3D animation remains a time-consuming and expertise-dependent process, requiring manual rigging, keyframing, and fine-tuning of complex motions. Meanwhile, video diffusion models have recently demonstrated remarkable motion imagination in 2D, generating dynamic and visually coherent motion from text or image prompts. However, their results lack explicit 3D structure and cannot be directly used for animation or simulation. We present AnimaMimic, a framework that animates static 3D meshes using motion priors learned from video diffusion models. Starting from an input mesh, AnimaMimic synthesizes a monocular animation video, automatically constructs a skeleton with skinning weights, and refines joint parameters through differentiable rendering and video-based supervision. To further enhance realism, we integrate a differentiable simulation module that refines mesh deformation through physically grounded soft-tissue dynamics. Our method bridges the creativity of video diffusion and the structural control of 3D rigged animation, producing physically plausible, temporally coherent, and artist-editable motion sequences that integrate seamlessly into standard animation pipelines. Our project page is at: https://xpandora.github.io/AnimaMimic/

3D facial avatar reconstruction has been a significant research topic in computer graphics and computer vision, where photo-realistic rendering and flexible controls over poses and expressions are necessary for many related applications. Recently, its performance has been greatly improved with the development of neural radiance fields (NeRF). However, most existing NeRF-based facial avatars focus on subject-specific reconstruction and reenactment, requiring multi-shot images containing different views of the specific subject for training, and the learned model cannot generalize to new identities, limiting its further applications. In this work, we propose a one-shot 3D facial avatar reconstruction framework that only requires a single source image to reconstruct a high-fidelity 3D facial avatar. For the challenges of lacking generalization ability and missing multi-view information, we leverage the generative prior of 3D GAN and develop an efficient encoder-decoder network to reconstruct the canonical neural volume of the source image, and further propose a compensation network to complement facial details. To enable fine-grained control over facial dynamics, we propose a deformation field to warp the canonical volume into driven expressions. Through extensive experimental comparisons, we achieve superior synthesis results compared to several state-of-the-art methods.

Existing methods for 3D tracking from monocular RGB videos predominantly consider articulated and rigid objects. Modelling dense non-rigid object deformations in this setting remained largely unaddressed so far, although such effects can improve the realism of the downstream applications such as AR/VR and avatar communications. This is due to the severe ill-posedness of the monocular view setting and the associated challenges. While it is possible to naively track multiple non-rigid objects independently using 3D templates or parametric 3D models, such an approach would suffer from multiple artefacts in the resulting 3D estimates such as depth ambiguity, unnatural intra-object collisions and missing or implausible deformations. Hence, this paper introduces the first method that addresses the fundamental challenges depicted above and that allows tracking human hands interacting with human faces in 3D from single monocular RGB videos. We model hands as articulated objects inducing non-rigid face deformations during an active interaction. Our method relies on a new hand-face motion and interaction capture dataset with realistic face deformations acquired with a markerless multi-view camera system. As a pivotal step in its creation, we process the reconstructed raw 3D shapes with position-based dynamics and an approach for non-uniform stiffness estimation of the head tissues, which results in plausible annotations of the surface deformations, hand-face contact regions and head-hand positions. At the core of our neural approach are a variational auto-encoder supplying the hand-face depth prior and modules that guide the 3D tracking by estimating the contacts and the deformations. Our final 3D hand and face reconstructions are realistic and more plausible compared to several baselines applicable in our setting, both quantitatively and qualitatively. https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/Decaf

One-shot video-driven talking face generation aims at producing a synthetic talking video by transferring the facial motion from a video to an arbitrary portrait image. Head pose and facial expression are always entangled in facial motion and transferred simultaneously. However, the entanglement sets up a barrier for these methods to be used in video portrait editing directly, where it may require to modify the expression only while maintaining the pose unchanged. One challenge of decoupling pose and expression is the lack of paired data, such as the same pose but different expressions. Only a few methods attempt to tackle this challenge with the feat of 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) for explicit disentanglement. But 3DMMs are not accurate enough to capture facial details due to the limited number of Blenshapes, which has side effects on motion transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-supervised disentanglement framework to decouple pose and expression without 3DMMs and paired data, which consists of a motion editing module, a pose generator, and an expression generator. The editing module projects faces into a latent space where pose motion and expression motion can be disentangled, and the pose or expression transfer can be performed in the latent space conveniently via addition. The two generators render the modified latent codes to images, respectively. Moreover, to guarantee the disentanglement, we propose a bidirectional cyclic training strategy with well-designed constraints. Evaluations demonstrate our method can control pose or expression independently and be used for general video editing.

Personalized 3D avatars require an animatable representation of digital humans. Doing so instantly from monocular videos offers scalability to broad class of users and wide-scale applications. In this paper, we present a fast, simple, yet effective method for creating animatable 3D digital humans from monocular videos. Our method utilizes the efficiency of Gaussian splatting to model both 3D geometry and appearance. However, we observed that naively optimizing Gaussian splats results in inaccurate geometry, thereby leading to poor animations. This work achieves and illustrates the need of accurate 3D mesh-type modelling of the human body for animatable digitization through Gaussian splats. This is achieved by developing a novel pipeline that benefits from three key aspects: (a) implicit modelling of surface's displacements and the color's spherical harmonics; (b) binding of 3D Gaussians to the respective triangular faces of the body template; (c) a novel technique to render normals followed by their auxiliary supervision. Our exhaustive experiments on three different benchmark datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art results of our method, in limited time settings. In fact, our method is faster by an order of magnitude (in terms of training time) than its closest competitor. At the same time, we achieve superior rendering and 3D reconstruction performance under the change of poses.

The domain of 3D talking head generation has witnessed significant progress in recent years. A notable challenge in this field consists in blending speech-related motions with expression dynamics, which is primarily caused by the lack of comprehensive 3D datasets that combine diversity in spoken sentences with a variety of facial expressions. Whereas literature works attempted to exploit 2D video data and parametric 3D models as a workaround, these still show limitations when jointly modeling the two motions. In this work, we address this problem from a different perspective, and propose an innovative data-driven technique that we used for creating a synthetic dataset, called EmoVOCA, obtained by combining a collection of inexpressive 3D talking heads and a set of 3D expressive sequences. To demonstrate the advantages of this approach, and the quality of the dataset, we then designed and trained an emotional 3D talking head generator that accepts a 3D face, an audio file, an emotion label, and an intensity value as inputs, and learns to animate the audio-synchronized lip movements with expressive traits of the face. Comprehensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, using our data and generator evidence superior ability in synthesizing convincing animations, when compared with the best performing methods in the literature. Our code and pre-trained model will be made available.

High-fidelity head avatar reconstruction plays a crucial role in AR/VR, gaming, and multimedia content creation. Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated effectiveness in modeling complex geometry with real-time rendering capability and are now widely used in high-fidelity head avatar reconstruction tasks. However, existing 3DGS-based methods still face significant challenges in capturing fine-grained facial expressions and preserving local texture continuity, especially in highly deformable regions. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel 3DGS-based framework termed EAvatar for head reconstruction that is both expression-aware and deformation-aware. Our method introduces a sparse expression control mechanism, where a small number of key Gaussians are used to influence the deformation of their neighboring Gaussians, enabling accurate modeling of local deformations and fine-scale texture transitions. Furthermore, we leverage high-quality 3D priors from pretrained generative models to provide a more reliable facial geometry, offering structural guidance that improves convergence stability and shape accuracy during training. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces more accurate and visually coherent head reconstructions with improved expression controllability and detail fidelity.

The creation of high-fidelity, digital versions of human heads is an important stepping stone in the process of further integrating virtual components into our everyday lives. Constructing such avatars is a challenging research problem, due to a high demand for photo-realism and real-time rendering performance. In this work, we propose Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars (NPGA), a data-driven approach to create high-fidelity, controllable avatars from multi-view video recordings. We build our method around 3D Gaussian Splatting for its highly efficient rendering and to inherit the topological flexibility of point clouds. In contrast to previous work, we condition our avatars' dynamics on the rich expression space of neural parametric head models (NPHM), instead of mesh-based 3DMMs. To this end, we distill the backward deformation field of our underlying NPHM into forward deformations which are compatible with rasterization-based rendering. All remaining fine-scale, expression-dependent details are learned from the multi-view videos. To increase the representational capacity of our avatars, we augment the canonical Gaussian point cloud using per-primitive latent features which govern its dynamic behavior. To regularize this increased dynamic expressivity, we propose Laplacian terms on the latent features and predicted dynamics. We evaluate our method on the public NeRSemble dataset, demonstrating that NPGA significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art avatars on the self-reenactment task by 2.6 PSNR. Furthermore, we demonstrate accurate animation capabilities from real-world monocular videos.

Tuning-free approaches adapting large-scale pre-trained video diffusion models for identity-preserving text-to-video generation (IPT2V) have gained popularity recently due to their efficacy and scalability. However, significant challenges remain to achieve satisfied facial dynamics while keeping the identity unchanged. In this work, we present a novel tuning-free IPT2V framework by enhancing face knowledge of the pre-trained video model built on diffusion transformers (DiT), dubbed FantasyID. Essentially, 3D facial geometry prior is incorporated to ensure plausible facial structures during video synthesis. To prevent the model from learning copy-paste shortcuts that simply replicate reference face across frames, a multi-view face augmentation strategy is devised to capture diverse 2D facial appearance features, hence increasing the dynamics over the facial expressions and head poses. Additionally, after blending the 2D and 3D features as guidance, instead of naively employing cross-attention to inject guidance cues into DiT layers, a learnable layer-aware adaptive mechanism is employed to selectively inject the fused features into each individual DiT layers, facilitating balanced modeling of identity preservation and motion dynamics. Experimental results validate our model's superiority over the current tuning-free IPT2V methods.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has improved a lot recently while most related works only utilize acoustic modality and neglect the influence of visual and textual cues, leading to unsatisfactory results in terms of precision and coherence. We argue that visual and textual cues are not trivial information. Therefore, we present a novel framework, namely PMMTalk, using complementary Pseudo Multi-Modal features for improving the accuracy of facial animation. The framework entails three modules: PMMTalk encoder, cross-modal alignment module, and PMMTalk decoder. Specifically, the PMMTalk encoder employs the off-the-shelf talking head generation architecture and speech recognition technology to extract visual and textual information from speech, respectively. Subsequently, the cross-modal alignment module aligns the audio-image-text features at temporal and semantic levels. Then PMMTalk decoder is employed to predict lip-syncing facial blendshape coefficients. Contrary to prior methods, PMMTalk only requires an additional random reference face image but yields more accurate results. Additionally, it is artist-friendly as it seamlessly integrates into standard animation production workflows by introducing facial blendshape coefficients. Finally, given the scarcity of 3D talking face datasets, we introduce a large-scale 3D Chinese Audio-Visual Facial Animation (3D-CAVFA) dataset. Extensive experiments and user studies show that our approach outperforms the state of the art. We recommend watching the supplementary video.

Reconstructing photorealistic and animatable 4D head avatars from a single portrait image remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. While diffusion models have enabled remarkable progress in image and video generation for avatar reconstruction, existing methods primarily rely on 2D priors and struggle to achieve consistent 3D geometry. We propose a novel framework that leverages geometry-aware diffusion to learn strong geometry priors for high-fidelity head avatar reconstruction. Our approach jointly synthesizes portrait images and corresponding surface normals, while a pose-free expression encoder captures implicit expression representations. Both synthesized images and expression latents are incorporated into 3D Gaussian-based avatars, enabling photorealistic rendering with accurate geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, expression fidelity, and cross-identity generalization, while supporting real-time rendering.

Accurate reconstruction and tracking of dynamic human faces from image sequences is challenging because non-rigid deformations, expression changes, and viewpoint variations occur simultaneously, creating significant ambiguity in geometry and correspondence estimation. We present a unified method for high-fidelity 4D facial reconstruction based on canonical facial point prediction, a representation that assigns each pixel a normalized facial coordinate in a shared canonical space. This formulation transforms dense tracking and dynamic reconstruction into a canonical reconstruction problem, enabling temporally consistent geometry and reliable correspondences within a single feed-forward model. By jointly predicting depth and canonical coordinates, our method enables accurate depth estimation, temporally stable reconstruction, dense 3D geometry, and robust facial point tracking within a single architecture. We implement this formulation using a transformer-based model that jointly predicts depth and canonical facial coordinates, trained using multi-view geometry data that non-rigidly warps into the canonical space. Extensive experiments on image and video benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across reconstruction and tracking tasks, achieving approximately 3times lower correspondence error and faster inference than prior dynamic reconstruction methods, while improving depth accuracy by 16%. These results highlight canonical facial point prediction as an effective foundation for unified feed-forward 4D facial reconstruction.

We study the problem of creating high-fidelity and animatable 3D avatars from only textual descriptions. Existing text-to-avatar methods are either limited to static avatars which cannot be animated or struggle to generate animatable avatars with promising quality and precise pose control. To address these limitations, we propose AvatarStudio, a coarse-to-fine generative model that generates explicit textured 3D meshes for animatable human avatars. Specifically, AvatarStudio begins with a low-resolution NeRF-based representation for coarse generation, followed by incorporating SMPL-guided articulation into the explicit mesh representation to support avatar animation and high resolution rendering. To ensure view consistency and pose controllability of the resulting avatars, we introduce a 2D diffusion model conditioned on DensePose for Score Distillation Sampling supervision. By effectively leveraging the synergy between the articulated mesh representation and the DensePose-conditional diffusion model, AvatarStudio can create high-quality avatars from text that are ready for animation, significantly outperforming previous methods. Moreover, it is competent for many applications, e.g., multimodal avatar animations and style-guided avatar creation. For more results, please refer to our project page: http://jeff95.me/projects/avatarstudio.html

Based on a combined data set of 4000 high resolution facial scans, we introduce a non-linear morphable face model, capable of producing multifarious face geometry of pore-level resolution, coupled with material attributes for use in physically-based rendering. We aim to maximize the variety of face identities, while increasing the robustness of correspondence between unique components, including middle-frequency geometry, albedo maps, specular intensity maps and high-frequency displacement details. Our deep learning based generative model learns to correlate albedo and geometry, which ensures the anatomical correctness of the generated assets. We demonstrate potential use of our generative model for novel identity generation, model fitting, interpolation, animation, high fidelity data visualization, and low-to-high resolution data domain transferring. We hope the release of this generative model will encourage further cooperation between all graphics, vision, and data focused professionals while demonstrating the cumulative value of every individual's complete biometric profile.

We present SplattingAvatar, a hybrid 3D representation of photorealistic human avatars with Gaussian Splatting embedded on a triangle mesh, which renders over 300 FPS on a modern GPU and 30 FPS on a mobile device. We disentangle the motion and appearance of a virtual human with explicit mesh geometry and implicit appearance modeling with Gaussian Splatting. The Gaussians are defined by barycentric coordinates and displacement on a triangle mesh as Phong surfaces. We extend lifted optimization to simultaneously optimize the parameters of the Gaussians while walking on the triangle mesh. SplattingAvatar is a hybrid representation of virtual humans where the mesh represents low-frequency motion and surface deformation, while the Gaussians take over the high-frequency geometry and detailed appearance. Unlike existing deformation methods that rely on an MLP-based linear blend skinning (LBS) field for motion, we control the rotation and translation of the Gaussians directly by mesh, which empowers its compatibility with various animation techniques, e.g., skeletal animation, blend shapes, and mesh editing. Trainable from monocular videos for both full-body and head avatars, SplattingAvatar shows state-of-the-art rendering quality across multiple datasets.

The generation of stylistic 3D facial animations driven by speech poses a significant challenge as it requires learning a many-to-many mapping between speech, style, and the corresponding natural facial motion. However, existing methods either employ a deterministic model for speech-to-motion mapping or encode the style using a one-hot encoding scheme. Notably, the one-hot encoding approach fails to capture the complexity of the style and thus limits generalization ability. In this paper, we propose DiffPoseTalk, a generative framework based on the diffusion model combined with a style encoder that extracts style embeddings from short reference videos. During inference, we employ classifier-free guidance to guide the generation process based on the speech and style. We extend this to include the generation of head poses, thereby enhancing user perception. Additionally, we address the shortage of scanned 3D talking face data by training our model on reconstructed 3DMM parameters from a high-quality, in-the-wild audio-visual dataset. Our extensive experiments and user study demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Recent advancements in speech-driven 3D talking head generation have made significant progress in lip synchronization. However, existing models still struggle to capture the perceptual alignment between varying speech characteristics and corresponding lip movements. In this work, we claim that three criteria -- Temporal Synchronization, Lip Readability, and Expressiveness -- are crucial for achieving perceptually accurate lip movements. Motivated by our hypothesis that a desirable representation space exists to meet these three criteria, we introduce a speech-mesh synchronized representation that captures intricate correspondences between speech signals and 3D face meshes. We found that our learned representation exhibits desirable characteristics, and we plug it into existing models as a perceptual loss to better align lip movements to the given speech. In addition, we utilize this representation as a perceptual metric and introduce two other physically grounded lip synchronization metrics to assess how well the generated 3D talking heads align with these three criteria. Experiments show that training 3D talking head generation models with our perceptual loss significantly improve all three aspects of perceptually accurate lip synchronization. Codes and datasets are available at https://perceptual-3d-talking-head.github.io/.

Polygonal meshes are the standard surface representation of modern 3D pipelines, and generating high-quality meshes with artist-style topology is essential for film, gaming, and interactive 3D applications. Mainstream approaches serialize a mesh into a token sequence and decode it autoregressively, which is slow at inference and sensitive to error accumulation, making them impractical for interactive asset creation. We present Meshy T2, a fast native mesh generation framework built on flow matching. At its core is a vertex-set mesh VAE that encodes a mesh into one continuous latent token per vertex and decodes vertices, edge connectivity, and face winding order in a single pass, preserving high-precision geometry and artist-authored topology without vertex quantization or welding. Generation proceeds as a coarse-to-fine cascade of two flow-matching models: an image-conditioned voxel flow first sketches the overall shape as a coarse occupancy scaffold, and a mesh flow then populates the scaffold with per-vertex latent tokens, conditioned on the image, the scaffold, and a requested vertex budget. This design delivers three practical capabilities: interactive generation speed through parallel flow-based synthesis; effective face-count control through the requested vertex budget; and native support for multi-part assets, whose components emerge directly from the generated connectivity. In our experiments, Meshy T2 achieves state-of-the-art geometric fidelity and completes end-to-end image-to-mesh generation within a median of 6 seconds, over an order of magnitude faster than autoregressive baselines. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/meshy-dev/meshy-t2.

We introduce SAM 3D Body (3DB), a promptable model for single-image full-body 3D human mesh recovery (HMR) that demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with strong generalization and consistent accuracy in diverse in-the-wild conditions. 3DB estimates the human pose of the body, feet, and hands. It is the first model to use a new parametric mesh representation, Momentum Human Rig (MHR), which decouples skeletal structure and surface shape. 3DB employs an encoder-decoder architecture and supports auxiliary prompts, including 2D keypoints and masks, enabling user-guided inference similar to the SAM family of models. We derive high-quality annotations from a multi-stage annotation pipeline that uses various combinations of manual keypoint annotation, differentiable optimization, multi-view geometry, and dense keypoint detection. Our data engine efficiently selects and processes data to ensure data diversity, collecting unusual poses and rare imaging conditions. We present a new evaluation dataset organized by pose and appearance categories, enabling nuanced analysis of model behavior. Our experiments demonstrate superior generalization and substantial improvements over prior methods in both qualitative user preference studies and traditional quantitative analysis. Both 3DB and MHR are open-source.

We introduce GaussianSpeech, a novel approach that synthesizes high-fidelity animation sequences of photo-realistic, personalized 3D human head avatars from spoken audio. To capture the expressive, detailed nature of human heads, including skin furrowing and finer-scale facial movements, we propose to couple speech signal with 3D Gaussian splatting to create realistic, temporally coherent motion sequences. We propose a compact and efficient 3DGS-based avatar representation that generates expression-dependent color and leverages wrinkle- and perceptually-based losses to synthesize facial details, including wrinkles that occur with different expressions. To enable sequence modeling of 3D Gaussian splats with audio, we devise an audio-conditioned transformer model capable of extracting lip and expression features directly from audio input. Due to the absence of high-quality datasets of talking humans in correspondence with audio, we captured a new large-scale multi-view dataset of audio-visual sequences of talking humans with native English accents and diverse facial geometry. GaussianSpeech consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with visually natural motion at real time rendering rates, while encompassing diverse facial expressions and styles.

We introduce FaceTalk, a novel generative approach designed for synthesizing high-fidelity 3D motion sequences of talking human heads from input audio signal. To capture the expressive, detailed nature of human heads, including hair, ears, and finer-scale eye movements, we propose to couple speech signal with the latent space of neural parametric head models to create high-fidelity, temporally coherent motion sequences. We propose a new latent diffusion model for this task, operating in the expression space of neural parametric head models, to synthesize audio-driven realistic head sequences. In the absence of a dataset with corresponding NPHM expressions to audio, we optimize for these correspondences to produce a dataset of temporally-optimized NPHM expressions fit to audio-video recordings of people talking. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a generative approach for realistic and high-quality motion synthesis of volumetric human heads, representing a significant advancement in the field of audio-driven 3D animation. Notably, our approach stands out in its ability to generate plausible motion sequences that can produce high-fidelity head animation coupled with the NPHM shape space. Our experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of FaceTalk, consistently achieving superior and visually natural motion, encompassing diverse facial expressions and styles, outperforming existing methods by 75% in perceptual user study evaluation.

Constructing vivid 3D head avatars for given subjects and realizing a series of animations on them is valuable yet challenging. This paper presents GaussianHead, which models the actional human head with anisotropic 3D Gaussians. In our framework, a motion deformation field and multi-resolution tri-plane are constructed respectively to deal with the head's dynamic geometry and complex texture. Notably, we impose an exclusive derivation scheme on each Gaussian, which generates its multiple doppelgangers through a set of learnable parameters for position transformation. With this design, we can compactly and accurately encode the appearance information of Gaussians, even those fitting the head's particular components with sophisticated structures. In addition, an inherited derivation strategy for newly added Gaussians is adopted to facilitate training acceleration. Extensive experiments show that our method can produce high-fidelity renderings, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in reconstruction, cross-identity reenactment, and novel view synthesis tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chiehwangs/gaussian-head.

We introduce Structured 3D Features, a model based on a novel implicit 3D representation that pools pixel-aligned image features onto dense 3D points sampled from a parametric, statistical human mesh surface. The 3D points have associated semantics and can move freely in 3D space. This allows for optimal coverage of the person of interest, beyond just the body shape, which in turn, additionally helps modeling accessories, hair, and loose clothing. Owing to this, we present a complete 3D transformer-based attention framework which, given a single image of a person in an unconstrained pose, generates an animatable 3D reconstruction with albedo and illumination decomposition, as a result of a single end-to-end model, trained semi-supervised, and with no additional postprocessing. We show that our S3F model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on various tasks, including monocular 3D reconstruction, as well as albedo and shading estimation. Moreover, we show that the proposed methodology allows novel view synthesis, relighting, and re-posing the reconstruction, and can naturally be extended to handle multiple input images (e.g. different views of a person, or the same view, in different poses, in video). Finally, we demonstrate the editing capabilities of our model for 3D virtual try-on applications.

Limited by the nature of the low-dimensional representational capacity of 3DMM, most of the 3DMM-based face reconstruction (FR) methods fail to recover high-frequency facial details, such as wrinkles, dimples, etc. Some attempt to solve the problem by introducing detail maps or non-linear operations, however, the results are still not vivid. To this end, we in this paper present a novel hierarchical representation network (HRN) to achieve accurate and detailed face reconstruction from a single image. Specifically, we implement the geometry disentanglement and introduce the hierarchical representation to fulfill detailed face modeling. Meanwhile, 3D priors of facial details are incorporated to enhance the accuracy and authenticity of the reconstruction results. We also propose a de-retouching module to achieve better decoupling of the geometry and appearance. It is noteworthy that our framework can be extended to a multi-view fashion by considering detail consistency of different views. Extensive experiments on two single-view and two multi-view FR benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing methods in both reconstruction accuracy and visual effects. Finally, we introduce a high-quality 3D face dataset FaceHD-100 to boost the research of high-fidelity face reconstruction. The project homepage is at https://younglbw.github.io/HRN-homepage/.

DiffusionAvatars synthesizes a high-fidelity 3D head avatar of a person, offering intuitive control over both pose and expression. We propose a diffusion-based neural renderer that leverages generic 2D priors to produce compelling images of faces. For coarse guidance of the expression and head pose, we render a neural parametric head model (NPHM) from the target viewpoint, which acts as a proxy geometry of the person. Additionally, to enhance the modeling of intricate facial expressions, we condition DiffusionAvatars directly on the expression codes obtained from NPHM via cross-attention. Finally, to synthesize consistent surface details across different viewpoints and expressions, we rig learnable spatial features to the head's surface via TriPlane lookup in NPHM's canonical space. We train DiffusionAvatars on RGB videos and corresponding tracked NPHM meshes of a person and test the obtained avatars in both self-reenactment and animation scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that DiffusionAvatars generates temporally consistent and visually appealing videos for novel poses and expressions of a person, outperforming existing approaches.

The efficient reconstruction of high-quality and intuitively editable human avatars presents a pressing challenge in the field of computer vision. Recent advancements, such as 3DGS, have demonstrated impressive reconstruction efficiency and rapid rendering speeds. However, intuitive local editing of these representations remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose AvatarBrush, a framework that reconstructs fully animatable and locally editable avatars using only a monocular video input. We propose a three-layer model to represent the avatar and, inspired by mesh morphing techniques, design a framework to generate the Gaussian model from local information of the parametric body model. Compared to previous methods that require scanned meshes or multi-view captures as input, our approach reduces costs and enhances editing capabilities such as body shape adjustment, local texture modification, and geometry transfer. Our experimental results demonstrate superior quality across two datasets and emphasize the enhanced, user-friendly, and localized editing capabilities of our method.

We introduce GaussianAvatars, a new method to create photorealistic head avatars that are fully controllable in terms of expression, pose, and viewpoint. The core idea is a dynamic 3D representation based on 3D Gaussian splats that are rigged to a parametric morphable face model. This combination facilitates photorealistic rendering while allowing for precise animation control via the underlying parametric model, e.g., through expression transfer from a driving sequence or by manually changing the morphable model parameters. We parameterize each splat by a local coordinate frame of a triangle and optimize for explicit displacement offset to obtain a more accurate geometric representation. During avatar reconstruction, we jointly optimize for the morphable model parameters and Gaussian splat parameters in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate the animation capabilities of our photorealistic avatar in several challenging scenarios. For instance, we show reenactments from a driving video, where our method outperforms existing works by a significant margin.

We introduce 3D Gaussian blendshapes for modeling photorealistic head avatars. Taking a monocular video as input, we learn a base head model of neutral expression, along with a group of expression blendshapes, each of which corresponds to a basis expression in classical parametric face models. Both the neutral model and expression blendshapes are represented as 3D Gaussians, which contain a few properties to depict the avatar appearance. The avatar model of an arbitrary expression can be effectively generated by combining the neutral model and expression blendshapes through linear blending of Gaussians with the expression coefficients. High-fidelity head avatar animations can be synthesized in real time using Gaussian splatting. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our Gaussian blendshape representation better captures high-frequency details exhibited in input video, and achieves superior rendering performance.

This work addresses the problem of generating 3D holistic body motions from human speech. Given a speech recording, we synthesize sequences of 3D body poses, hand gestures, and facial expressions that are realistic and diverse. To achieve this, we first build a high-quality dataset of 3D holistic body meshes with synchronous speech. We then define a novel speech-to-motion generation framework in which the face, body, and hands are modeled separately. The separated modeling stems from the fact that face articulation strongly correlates with human speech, while body poses and hand gestures are less correlated. Specifically, we employ an autoencoder for face motions, and a compositional vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) for the body and hand motions. The compositional VQ-VAE is key to generating diverse results. Additionally, we propose a cross-conditional autoregressive model that generates body poses and hand gestures, leading to coherent and realistic motions. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our novel dataset and code will be released for research purposes at https://talkshow.is.tue.mpg.de.

Face animation, one of the hottest topics in computer vision, has achieved a promising performance with the help of generative models. However, it remains a critical challenge to generate identity preserving and photo-realistic images due to the sophisticated motion deformation and complex facial detail modeling. To address these problems, we propose a Face Neural Volume Rendering (FNeVR) network to fully explore the potential of 2D motion warping and 3D volume rendering in a unified framework. In FNeVR, we design a 3D Face Volume Rendering (FVR) module to enhance the facial details for image rendering. Specifically, we first extract 3D information with a well-designed architecture, and then introduce an orthogonal adaptive ray-sampling module for efficient rendering. We also design a lightweight pose editor, enabling FNeVR to edit the facial pose in a simple yet effective way. Extensive experiments show that our FNeVR obtains the best overall quality and performance on widely used talking-head benchmarks.

Animation of 2D hand-drawn sketches provides an effective medium for visual communication. However, these sketches pose challenges, particularly in handling occlusions and accurately mapping motion. While 3D animation naturally addresses these challenges, estimating 3D motion remains a very complex task. Recent approaches to converting 2D sketches to 3D animations have mainly focused on specific types of motion, such as bipedal movements and facial expressions. We propose Sketch2Motion, a diffusion-guided framework for skeleton-based motion synthesis that combines classical character animation pipelines with deep generative priors. Our method represents motion using skeletal transformations, which are propagated to mesh deformations via linear blend skinning. To guide the resulting animation toward realistic and semantically meaningful motion, we integrate a text-to-video diffusion model via motion-aware score-distillation sampling (MoSDS), enabling optimization without paired motion data. Additionally, we apply physics-inspired smoothness, topological, and contact constraints to stabilize optimization and preserve motion plausibility. Further, we integrate a spring-mass simulator to introduce secondary motion effects. The proposed framework is generalized, fully differentiable, modular, and compatible with biped, quadruped, and non-living articulated characters. Experiments demonstrate that our approach produces temporally coherent, text-aligned animations that outperform baseline motion transfer methods that lack generative priors or explicit physical constraints. We will make our code and dataset publicly available.

Animation of humanoid characters is essential in various graphics applications, but requires significant time and cost to create realistic animations. We propose an approach to synthesize 4D animated sequences of input static 3D humanoid meshes, leveraging strong generalized motion priors from generative video models -- as such video models contain powerful motion information covering a wide variety of human motions. From an input static 3D humanoid mesh and a text prompt describing the desired animation, we synthesize a corresponding video conditioned on a rendered image of the 3D mesh. We then employ an underlying SMPL representation to animate the corresponding 3D mesh according to the video-generated motion, based on our motion optimization. This enables a cost-effective and accessible solution to enable the synthesis of diverse and realistic 4D animations.

Creating high-fidelity, animatable 3D avatars from a single image remains a formidable challenge. We identified three desirable attributes of avatar generation: 1) the method should be feed-forward, 2) model a 360° full-head, and 3) should be animation-ready. However, current work addresses only two of the three points simultaneously. To address these limitations, we propose OMEGA-Avatar, the first feed-forward framework that simultaneously generates a generalizable, 360°-complete, and animatable 3D Gaussian head from a single image. Starting from a feed-forward and animatable framework, we address the 360° full-head avatar generation problem with two novel components. First, to overcome poor hair modeling in full-head avatar generation, we introduce a semantic-aware mesh deformation module that integrates multi-view normals to optimize a FLAME head with hair while preserving its topology structure. Second, to enable effective feed-forward decoding of full-head features, we propose a multi-view feature splatting module that constructs a shared canonical UV representation from features across multiple views through differentiable bilinear splatting, hierarchical UV mapping, and visibility-aware fusion. This approach preserves both global structural coherence and local high-frequency details across all viewpoints, ensuring 360° consistency without per-instance optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMEGA-Avatar achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing baselines in 360° full-head completeness while robustly preserving identity across different viewpoints.

Creating a realistic animatable avatar from a single static portrait remains challenging. Existing approaches often struggle to capture subtle facial expressions, the associated global body movements, and the dynamic background. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that leverages a pretrained video diffusion transformer model to generate high-fidelity, coherent talking portraits with controllable motion dynamics. At the core of our work is a dual-stage audio-visual alignment strategy. In the first stage, we employ a clip-level training scheme to establish coherent global motion by aligning audio-driven dynamics across the entire scene, including the reference portrait, contextual objects, and background. In the second stage, we refine lip movements at the frame level using a lip-tracing mask, ensuring precise synchronization with audio signals. To preserve identity without compromising motion flexibility, we replace the commonly used reference network with a facial-focused cross-attention module that effectively maintains facial consistency throughout the video. Furthermore, we integrate a motion intensity modulation module that explicitly controls expression and body motion intensity, enabling controllable manipulation of portrait movements beyond mere lip motion. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves higher quality with better realism, coherence, motion intensity, and identity preservation. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-talking/.

Recently, 3D-aware face editing has witnessed remarkable progress. Although current approaches successfully perform mask-guided or text-based editing, these properties have not been combined into a single method. To address this limitation, we propose MaTe3D: mask-guided text-based 3D-aware portrait editing. First, we propose a new SDF-based 3D generator. To better perform masked-based editing (mainly happening in local areas), we propose SDF and density consistency losses, aiming to effectively model both the global and local representations jointly. Second, we introduce an inference-optimized method. We introduce two techniques based on the SDS (Score Distillation Sampling), including a blending SDS and a conditional SDS. The former aims to overcome the mismatch problem between geometry and appearance, ultimately harming fidelity. The conditional SDS contributes to further producing satisfactory and stable results. Additionally, we create CatMask-HQ dataset, a large-scale high-resolution cat face annotations. We perform experiments on both the FFHQ and CatMask-HQ datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our method generates faithfully a edited 3D-aware face image given a modified mask and a text prompt. Our code and models will be publicly released.

Recently, we have witnessed the explosive growth of various volumetric representations in modeling animatable head avatars. However, due to the diversity of frameworks, there is no practical method to support high-level applications like 3D head avatar editing across different representations. In this paper, we propose a generic avatar editing approach that can be universally applied to various 3DMM driving volumetric head avatars. To achieve this goal, we design a novel expression-aware modification generative model, which enables lift 2D editing from a single image to a consistent 3D modification field. To ensure the effectiveness of the generative modification process, we develop several techniques, including an expression-dependent modification distillation scheme to draw knowledge from the large-scale head avatar model and 2D facial texture editing tools, implicit latent space guidance to enhance model convergence, and a segmentation-based loss reweight strategy for fine-grained texture inversion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers high-quality and consistent results across multiple expression and viewpoints. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/geneavatar/

We introduce FiCA, a Feed-forward, instant Gaussian Codec Avatar generation pipeline that creates lifelike avatars from a single portrait image. Generating a photorealistic and drivable avatar from just a single image is significantly challenging due to the limited visual information available to accurately infer the 3D appearance and geometry of human heads. To address this, we develop a novel system that combines human-centric vision foundation models with a diffusion model. This system is designed to fully exploit partial visual observations to generate lifelike human avatars. Our proposed diffusion model learns a generative mapping from these partial observations to complete and authentic 3D mesh reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a feed-forward mesh refinement network that enhances the fidelity and identity preservation of the generated avatars, eliminating the need for person-specific test-time optimization. By leveraging a universal prior model that decodes a generated mesh into a set of 3D Gaussians, we generate a photorealistic 3D Gaussian avatar, capable of being driven with novel expressions in real-time. Our experiments demonstrate that the avatars generated by our feed-forward approach faithfully represent diverse identities and surpass the visual quality of avatars produced by recent competing methods.

Talking Head Generation aims at synthesizing natural-looking talking videos from speech and a single portrait image. Previous 3D talking head generation methods have relied on domain-specific heuristics such as warping-based facial motion representation priors to animate talking motions, yet still produce inaccurate 3D avatar reconstructions, thus undermining the realism of generated animations. We introduce Splat-Portrait, a Gaussian-splatting-based method that addresses the challenges of 3D head reconstruction and lip motion synthesis. Our approach automatically learns to disentangle a single portrait image into a static 3D reconstruction represented as static Gaussian Splatting, and a predicted whole-image 2D background. It then generates natural lip motion conditioned on input audio, without any motion driven priors. Training is driven purely by 2D reconstruction and score-distillation losses, without 3D supervision nor landmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that Splat-Portrait exhibits superior performance on talking head generation and novel view synthesis, achieving better visual quality compared to previous works. Our project code and supplementary documents are public available at https://github.com/stonewalking/Splat-portrait.