# GPAvatar: Generalizable and Precise Head Avatar from Image(s)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10215 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10215/

## Key facts

- Cited by 74 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [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)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [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)
- [PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08379/) (2021)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04036/) (2022)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [Morphable Face Models - An Open Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08398/) (2017)
- [MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07621/) (2022)
- [RigNeRF: Fully Controllable Neural 3D Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06481/) (2022)
- [Next3D: Generative Neural Texture Rasterization for 3D-Aware Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11208/) (2022)
- [Realistic One-shot Mesh-based Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08343/) (2022)
- [Fast Bi-layer Neural Synthesis of One-Shot Realistic Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10174/) (2020)
- [Real-time Neural Radiance Talking Portrait Synthesis via Audio-spatial Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12368/) (2022)
- [One-Shot High-Fidelity Talking-Head Synthesis with Deformable Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05097/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Generalizable and Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07971/) (2024)
- [Portrait4D-v2: Pseudo Multi-View Data Creates Better 4D Head Synthesizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13570/) (2024)
- [Avat3r: Large Animatable Gaussian Reconstruction Model for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20220/) (2025)
- [HeadGAP: Few-Shot 3D Head Avatar via Generalizable Gaussian Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06019/) (2024)
- [LAM: Large Avatar Model for One-shot Animatable Gaussian Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17796/) (2025)
- [ARTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Head Animation via Autoregressive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20323/) (2025)
- [HRAvatar: High-Quality and Relightable Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08224/) (2025)
- [GUAVA: Generalizable Upper Body 3D Gaussian Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03351/) (2025)
- [VOODOO XP: Expressive One-Shot Head Reenactment for VR Telepresence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16204/) (2024)
- [MimicTalk: Mimicking a personalized and expressive 3D talking face in minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06734/) (2024)
- [AvatarArtist: Open-Domain 4D Avatarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19906/) (2025)
- [SEGA: Drivable 3D Gaussian Head Avatar from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14373/) (2025)
- [UniLS: End-to-End Audio-Driven Avatars for Unified Listening and Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09327/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Deja-vu: Creating Controllable 3D Gaussian Head-Avatars with Enhanced Generalization and Personalization Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16147/) (2024)
- [Monocular and Generalizable Gaussian Talking Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00665/) (2025)
- [FlexAvatar: Learning Complete 3D Head Avatars with Partial Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15599/) (2025)
- [DH-FaceVid-1K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Face Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07151/) (2024)
- [Zero-1-to-A: Zero-Shot One Image to Animatable Head Avatars Using Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15851/) (2025)
- [SyncTalk++: High-Fidelity and Efficient Synchronized Talking Heads Synthesis Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14742/) (2025)
- [FastAvatar: Instant 3D Gaussian Splatting for Faces from Single Unconstrained Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18389/) (2025)
- [FastAvatar: Towards Unified and Fast 3D Avatar Reconstruction with Large Gaussian Reconstruction Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19754/) (2025)
- [PanoLAM: Large Avatar Model for Gaussian Full-Head Synthesis from One-shot Unposed Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07552/) (2025)
- [GHOST 2.0: generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18417/) (2025)
- [FaceCraft4D: Animated 3D Facial Avatar Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15179/) (2025)
- [UIKA: Fast Universal Head Avatar from Pose-Free Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07603/) (2026)
- [FastGHA: Generalized Few-Shot 3D Gaussian Head Avatars with Real-Time Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13837/) (2026)
- [Coherent 3D Portrait Video Reconstruction via Triplane Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00794/) (2024)
- [Controlling Avatar Diffusion with Learnable Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15809/) (2025)
- [VASA-3D: Lifelike Audio-Driven Gaussian Head Avatars from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14677/) (2025)
- [Text-based Animatable 3D Avatars with Morphable Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15835/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Head avatar reconstruction, crucial for applications in virtual reality, online meetings, gaming, and film industries, has garnered substantial attention within the computer vision community. The fundamental objective of this field is to faithfully recreate the head avatar and precisely control expressions and postures. Existing methods, categorized into 2D-based warping, mesh-based, and neural rendering approaches, present challenges in maintaining multi-view consistency, incorporating non-facial information, and generalizing to new identities. In this paper, we propose a framework named GPAvatar that reconstructs 3D head avatars from one or several images in a single forward pass. The key idea of this work is to introduce a dynamic point-based expression field driven by a point cloud to precisely and effectively capture expressions. Furthermore, we use a Multi Tri-planes Attention (MTA) fusion module in the tri-planes canonical field to leverage information from multiple input images. The proposed method achieves faithful identity reconstruction, precise expression control, and multi-view consistency, demonstrating promising results for free-viewpoint rendering and novel view synthesis.