# BlendFields: Few-Shot Example-Driven Facial Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07514 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07514/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Space-time Neural Irradiance Fields for Free-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12950/) (2020)
- [CLIP-NeRF: Text-and-Image Driven Manipulation of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05139/) (2021)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [Editing Conditional Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06466/) (2021)
- [NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04978/) (2022)
- [HyperNeRF: A Higher-Dimensional Representation for Topologically Varying Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13228/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MedShapeNet -- A Large-Scale Dataset of 3D Medical Shapes for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16139/) (2023)
- [Generalizable Neural Human Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14199/) (2024)
- [PhysHead: Simulation-Ready Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06467/) (2026)
- [360deg Volumetric Portrait Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05311/) (2023)
- [FaceFolds: Meshed Radiance Manifolds for Efficient Volumetric Rendering of Dynamic Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13807/) (2024)
- [LegacyAvatars: Volumetric Face Avatars For Traditional Graphics Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12285/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.