# UltrAvatar: A Realistic Animatable 3D Avatar Diffusion Model with Authenticity Guided Textures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 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 63 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2024.

## 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 63)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems using Manifold Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00941/) (2022)
- [Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07600/) (2022)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15640/) (2021)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [Text2Mesh: Text-Driven Neural Stylization for Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03221/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [MeGA: Hybrid Mesh-Gaussian Head Avatar for High-Fidelity Rendering and Head Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19026/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for Film Creation: A Survey of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08296/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models in 3D Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04738/) (2024)
- [StyleMM: Stylized 3D Morphable Face Model via Text-Driven Aligned Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11203/) (2025)
- [AvatarTex: High-Fidelity Facial Texture Reconstruction from Single-Image Stylized Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06721/) (2025)
- [Monocular Avatar Reconstruction via Cascaded Diffusion Priors and UV-Space Differentiable Shading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28144/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Conditional 3D Face Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01074/) (2024)
- [A multidimensional measurement of photorealistic avatar quality of experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09066/) (2024)
- [Bringing Diversity from Diffusion Models to Semantic-Guided Face Asset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15259/) (2025)
- [Improving Facial Rig Semantics for Tracking and Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08429/) (2025)
- [Dual Diffusion Models for Multi-modal Guided 3D Avatar Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04307/) (2026)
- [OMGTex: One-stage Multi-style Facial Texture Reconstruction without Geometry Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25778/) (2026)
- [Cage-based Texture Transfer with Geometric Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25220/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in 3D avatar generation have gained significant attentions. These breakthroughs aim to produce more realistic animatable avatars, narrowing the gap between virtual and real-world experiences. Most of existing works employ Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, combined with a differentiable renderer and text condition, to guide a diffusion model in generating 3D avatars. However, SDS often generates oversmoothed results with few facial details, thereby lacking the diversity compared with ancestral sampling. On the other hand, other works generate 3D avatar from a single image, where the challenges of unwanted lighting effects, perspective views, and inferior image quality make them difficult to reliably reconstruct the 3D face meshes with the aligned complete textures. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D avatar generation approach termed UltrAvatar with enhanced fidelity of geometry, and superior quality of physically based rendering (PBR) textures without unwanted lighting. To this end, the proposed approach presents a diffuse color extraction model and an authenticity guided texture diffusion model. The former removes the unwanted lighting effects to reveal true diffuse colors so that the generated avatars can be rendered under various lighting conditions. The latter follows two gradient-based guidances for generating PBR textures to render diverse face-identity features and details better aligning with 3D mesh geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the experiments.