# Unsupervised Volumetric Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00926/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [StyleNeRF: A Style-based 3D-Aware Generator for High-resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08985/) (2021)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [StyleGAN-V: A Continuous Video Generator with the Price, Image Quality and Perks of StyleGAN2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14683/) (2021)
- [StyleSDF: High-Resolution 3D-Consistent Image and Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11427/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Magic123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation Using Both 2D and 3D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17843/) (2023)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Text2Tex: Text-driven Texture Synthesis via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11396/) (2023)
- [AvatarCraft: Transforming Text into Neural Human Avatars with Parameterized Shape and Pose Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17606/) (2023)
- [EMOPortraits: Emotion-enhanced Multimodal One-shot Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19110/) (2024)
- [Portrait4D: Learning One-Shot 4D Head Avatar Synthesis using Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18729/) (2023)
- [SceneWiz3D: Towards Text-guided 3D Scene Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08885/) (2023)
- [AutoDecoding Latent 3D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05445/) (2023)
- [SceneTex: High-Quality Texture Synthesis for Indoor Scenes via Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17261/) (2023)
- [Implicit Neural Head Synthesis via Controllable Local Deformation Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11113/) (2023)
- [Correspondence-Free Non-Rigid Point Set Registration Using Unsupervised Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18817/) (2024)
- [3D-Aware Talking-Head Video Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02549/) (2023)
- [Occlusion-aware Non-Rigid Point Cloud Registration via Unsupervised Neural Deformation Correntropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10704/) (2025)
- [NToP: NeRF-Powered Large-scale Dataset Generation for 2D and 3D Human Pose Estimation in Top-View Fisheye Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18196/) (2024)
- [CustomTex: High-fidelity Indoor Scene Texturing via Multi-Reference Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19121/) (2026)
- [Instant Expressive Gaussian Head Avatars at Over 100 FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16893/) (2025)
- [High-Fidelity 3D Facial Avatar Synthesis with Controllable Fine-Grained Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14781/) (2026)
- [SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15659/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel approach for unsupervised 3D animation of non-rigid deformable objects. Our method learns the 3D structure and dynamics of objects solely from single-view RGB videos, and can decompose them into semantically meaningful parts that can be tracked and animated. Using a 3D autodecoder framework, paired with a keypoint estimator via a differentiable PnP algorithm, our model learns the underlying object geometry and parts decomposition in an entirely unsupervised manner. This allows it to perform 3D segmentation, 3D keypoint estimation, novel view synthesis, and animation. We primarily evaluate the framework on two video datasets: VoxCeleb 2562 and TEDXPeople 2562. In addition, on the Cats 2562 image dataset, we show it even learns compelling 3D geometry from still images. Finally, we show our model can obtain animatable 3D objects from a single or few images. Code and visual results available on our project website, see https://snap-research.github.io/unsupervised-volumetric-animation .