# AvatarStudio: Text-driven Editing of 3D Dynamic Human Head Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00547/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 55 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Text-Guided Object Generation with Dream Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01455/) (2021)
- [Instruct-NeRF2NeRF: Editing 3D Scenes with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12789/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [RealFusion: 360deg Reconstruction of Any Object from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10663/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07204/) (2023)
- [DiffusionAvatars: Deferred Diffusion for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18635/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [MVIP-NeRF: Multi-view 3D Inpainting on NeRF Scenes via Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02859/) (2024)
- [Morphable Diffusion: 3D-Consistent Diffusion for Single-image Avatar Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04728/) (2024)
- [HeadArtist: Text-conditioned 3D Head Generation with Self Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07539/) (2023)
- [TextToon: Real-Time Text Toonify Head Avatar from Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07160/) (2024)
- [DiffusionGAN3D: Boosting Text-guided 3D Generation and Domain Adaptation by Combining 3D GANs and Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16837/) (2023)
- [Efficient-NeRF2NeRF: Streamlining Text-Driven 3D Editing with Multiview Correspondence-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08563/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Human Avatar Modeling -- From Reconstruction to Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04253/) (2024)
- [Neural Radiance Field-based Visual Rendering: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00714/) (2024)
- [GeneAvatar: Generic Expression-Aware Volumetric Head Avatar Editing from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02152/) (2024)
- [Portrait Video Editing Empowered by Multimodal Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13591/) (2024)
- [Neural Impostor: Editing Neural Radiance Fields with Explicit Shape Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05391/) (2023)
- [WonderHuman: Hallucinating Unseen Parts in Dynamic 3D Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01045/) (2025)
- [GaussianAvatar-Editor: Photorealistic Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar Editor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09978/) (2025)
- [MagicMirror: Fast and High-Quality Avatar Generation with a Constrained Search Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01296/) (2024)
- [InstructHumans: Editing Animated 3D Human Textures with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04037/) (2024)
- [BeautyBank: Encoding Facial Makeup in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11231/) (2024)
- [Controlling Avatar Diffusion with Learnable Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15809/) (2025)
- [MorpheuS: Neural Dynamic 360deg Surface Reconstruction from Monocular RGB-D Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00778/) (2023)
- [T2Bs: Text-to-Character Blendshapes via Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10678/) (2025)
- [Avatar Concept Slider: Controllable Editing of Concepts in 3D Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13995/) (2024)
- [TEDRA: Text-based Editing of Dynamic and Photoreal Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15995/) (2024)
- [LightHeadEd: Relightable & Editable Head Avatars from a Smartphone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09671/) (2025)
- [EmoteGPT: 3D Human Facial Expressions from Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02674/) (2026)
- [CosAvatar: Consistent and Animatable Portrait Video Tuning with Text Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18288/) (2023)
- [GaussianIP: Identity-Preserving Realistic 3D Human Generation via Human-Centric Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11143/) (2025)
- [DevilSight: Augmenting Monocular Human Avatar Reconstruction through a Virtual Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00403/) (2025)
- [ManifoldSplat: Language-Guided Semantic Shape Editing of 3D Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03599/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Capturing and editing full head performances enables the creation of virtual characters with various applications such as extended reality and media production. The past few years witnessed a steep rise in the photorealism of human head avatars. Such avatars can be controlled through different input data modalities, including RGB, audio, depth, IMUs and others. While these data modalities provide effective means of control, they mostly focus on editing the head movements such as the facial expressions, head pose and/or camera viewpoint. In this paper, we propose AvatarStudio, a text-based method for editing the appearance of a dynamic full head avatar. Our approach builds on existing work to capture dynamic performances of human heads using neural radiance field (NeRF) and edits this representation with a text-to-image diffusion model. Specifically, we introduce an optimization strategy for incorporating multiple keyframes representing different camera viewpoints and time stamps of a video performance into a single diffusion model. Using this personalized diffusion model, we edit the dynamic NeRF by introducing view-and-time-aware Score Distillation Sampling (VT-SDS) following a model-based guidance approach. Our method edits the full head in a canonical space, and then propagates these edits to remaining time steps via a pretrained deformation network. We evaluate our method visually and numerically via a user study, and results show that our method outperforms existing approaches. Our experiments validate the design choices of our method and highlight that our edits are genuine, personalized, as well as 3D- and time-consistent.