# PAV: Personalized Head Avatar from Unstructured Video Collection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21047/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [State of the Art on Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03805/) (2020)
- [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)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)
- [Towards Metrical Reconstruction of Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06607/) (2022)
- [RetinaFace: Single-stage Dense Face Localisation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00641/) (2019)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [NeuMesh: Learning Disentangled Neural Mesh-based Implicit Field for Geometry and Texture Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11911/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Personalized Semantic Facial NeRF Models From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06108/) (2022)
- [RigNeRF: Fully Controllable Neural 3D Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06481/) (2022)
- [Fast Bi-layer Neural Synthesis of One-Shot Realistic Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10174/) (2020)
- [MetaPortrait: Identity-Preserving Talking Head Generation with Fast Personalized Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08062/) (2022)
- [Implicit Warping for Animation with Image Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01794/) (2022)
- [Learning Personalized High Quality Volumetric Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01436/) (2023)
- [Automatic Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02651/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Modelship Attribution: Tracing Multi-Stage Manipulations Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02405/) (2025)
- [TimeWalker: Personalized Neural Space for Lifelong Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02421/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose PAV, Personalized Head Avatar for the synthesis of human faces under arbitrary viewpoints and facial expressions. PAV introduces a method that learns a dynamic deformable neural radiance field (NeRF), in particular from a collection of monocular talking face videos of the same character under various appearance and shape changes. Unlike existing head NeRF methods that are limited to modeling such input videos on a per-appearance basis, our method allows for learning multi-appearance NeRFs, introducing appearance embedding for each input video via learnable latent neural features attached to the underlying geometry. Furthermore, the proposed appearance-conditioned density formulation facilitates the shape variation of the character, such as facial hair and soft tissues, in the radiance field prediction. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first dynamic deformable NeRF framework to model appearance and shape variations in a single unified network for multi-appearances of the same subject. We demonstrate experimentally that PAV outperforms the baseline method in terms of visual rendering quality in our quantitative and qualitative studies on various subjects.