# GANHead: Towards Generative Animatable Neural Head Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (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)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (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)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [StyleSDF: High-Resolution 3D-Consistent Image and Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11427/) (2021)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [Generating 3D faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10267/) (2018)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [HeadNeRF: A Real-time NeRF-based Parametric Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05637/) (2021)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)
- [Morphable Face Models - An Open Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08398/) (2017)
- [i3DMM: Deep Implicit 3D Morphable Model of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14143/) (2020)
- [Neural Lumigraph Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11571/) (2021)
- [FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14057/) (2022)
- [MoFaNeRF: Morphable Facial Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02308/) (2021)
- [Towards High-fidelity Nonlinear 3D Face Morphable Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04933/) (2019)
- [Multiface: A Dataset for Neural Face Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11243/) (2022)
- [H3D-Net: Few-Shot High-Fidelity 3D Head Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12512/) (2021)
- [FML: Face Model Learning from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07603/) (2018)
- [Learning Compositional Radiance Fields of Dynamic Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09955/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [HHAvatar: Gaussian Head Avatar with Dynamic Hairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03029/) (2023)
- [SphereHead: Stable 3D Full-head Synthesis with Spherical Tri-plane Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05680/) (2024)
- [AI-Generated Content (AIGC) for Various Data Modalities: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14177/) (2023)
- [MMHead: Towards Fine-grained Multi-modal 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07757/) (2024)
- [Neural Point-based Volumetric Avatar: Surface-guided Neural Points for Efficient and Photorealistic Volumetric Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05000/) (2023)
- [GPHM: Gaussian Parametric Head Model for Monocular Head Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15070/) (2024)
- [SingingHead: A Large-scale 4D Dataset for Singing Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04369/) (2023)
- [SyncTalk++: High-Fidelity and Efficient Synchronized Talking Heads Synthesis Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14742/) (2025)
- [Text-driven Talking Face Synthesis by Reprogramming Audio-driven Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16003/) (2023)
- [HyPlaneHead: Rethinking Tri-plane-like Representations in Full-Head Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16748/) (2025)
- [DreamBarbie: Text to Barbie-Style 3D Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09126/) (2024)
- [StrandHead: Text to Hair-Disentangled 3D Head Avatars Using Human-Centric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11586/) (2024)
- [Mask-Free Audio-driven Talking Face Generation for Enhanced Visual Quality and Identity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20953/) (2025)
- [Exploring Instruction Data Quality for Explainable Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03880/) (2025)
- [VideoAesBench: Benchmarking the Video Aesthetics Perception Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21915/) (2026)
- [FMReward: Aligning and Evaluating Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15296/) (2026)
- [Improving Facial Rig Semantics for Tracking and Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08429/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To bring digital avatars into people's lives, it is highly demanded to efficiently generate complete, realistic, and animatable head avatars. This task is challenging, and it is difficult for existing methods to satisfy all the requirements at once. To achieve these goals, we propose GANHead (Generative Animatable Neural Head Avatar), a novel generative head model that takes advantages of both the fine-grained control over the explicit expression parameters and the realistic rendering results of implicit representations. Specifically, GANHead represents coarse geometry, fine-gained details and texture via three networks in canonical space to obtain the ability to generate complete and realistic head avatars. To achieve flexible animation, we define the deformation filed by standard linear blend skinning (LBS), with the learned continuous pose and expression bases and LBS weights. This allows the avatars to be directly animated by FLAME parameters and generalize well to unseen poses and expressions. Compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, GANHead achieves superior performance on head avatar generation and raw scan fitting.