# GaussianHeads: End-to-End Learning of Drivable Gaussian Head Avatars from Coarse-to-fine Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11951/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [Deferred Neural Rendering: Image Synthesis using Neural Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12356/) (2019)
- [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)
- [HyperNeRF: A Higher-Dimensional Representation for Topologically Varying Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13228/) (2021)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07504/) (2023)
- [Neural Volumes: Learning Dynamic Renderable Volumes from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07751/) (2019)
- [Deep Appearance Models for Face Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00362/) (2018)
- [Reconstructing Personalized Semantic Facial NeRF Models From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06108/) (2022)
- [Pixel Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04638/) (2021)
- [RigNeRF: Fully Controllable Neural 3D Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06481/) (2022)
- [ASH: Animatable Gaussian Splats for Efficient and Photoreal Human Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05941/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Multi-level Face Model Learning for Monocular Reconstruction at over 250 Hz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02859/) (2017)
- [Towards High-fidelity Nonlinear 3D Face Morphable Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04933/) (2019)
- [Recycle-GAN: Unsupervised Video Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05174/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Avat3r: Large Animatable Gaussian Reconstruction Model for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20220/) (2025)
- [Advances in Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction and View Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14501/) (2025)
- [HRAvatar: High-Quality and Relightable Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08224/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Prior for Few-Shot Drivable Head Avatar Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06903/) (2025)
- [ScaffoldAvatar: High-Fidelity Gaussian Avatars with Patch Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10542/) (2025)
- [Monocular and Generalizable Gaussian Talking Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00665/) (2025)
- [EVA: Expressive Virtual Avatars from Multi-view Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15385/) (2025)
- [Audio-Driven Universal Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18924/) (2025)
- [Matrix-free Second-order Optimization of Gaussian Splats with Residual Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12905/) (2025)
- [TeGA: Texture Space Gaussian Avatars for High-Resolution Dynamic Head Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05672/) (2025)
- [HyperGaussians: High-Dimensional Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Animatable Face Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02803/) (2025)
- [RigAnyFace: Scaling Neural Facial Mesh Auto-Rigging with Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18601/) (2025)
- [DGH: Dynamic Gaussian Hair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17094/) (2025)
- [FlexAvatar: Flexible Large Reconstruction Model for Animatable Gaussian Head Avatars with Detailed Deformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17717/) (2025)
- [TexAvatars : Hybrid Texel-3D Representations for Stable Rigging of Photorealistic Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21099/) (2025)
- [PhysHead: Simulation-Ready Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06467/) (2026)
- [Hyper Diffusion Avatars: Dynamic Human Avatar Generation using Network Weight Space Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04145/) (2025)
- [EmoDiffTalk:Emotion-aware Diffusion for Editable 3D Gaussian Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05991/) (2025)
- [LegacyAvatars: Volumetric Face Avatars For Traditional Graphics Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12285/) (2026)
- [OMG-Avatar: One-shot Multi-LOD Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01506/) (2026)
- [Large-Scale High-Quality 3D Gaussian Head Reconstruction from Multi-View Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04035/) (2026)
- [Multi-view Consistent 3D Gaussian Head Avatars 'without' Multi-view Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25220/) (2026)
- [GRMM: Real-Time High-Fidelity Gaussian Morphable Head Model with Learned Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02141/) (2025)
- [Using Gaussian Splats to Create High-Fidelity Facial Geometry and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16397/) (2025)
- [RelightAnyone: A Generalized Relightable 3D Gaussian Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03357/) (2026)
- [3DRealHead: Few-Shot Detailed Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13171/) (2026)
- [One-shot Compositional 3D Head Avatars with Deformable Hair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14782/) (2026)
- [EAD-Net: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Generation with Spatial Refinement and Temporal Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23325/) (2026)
- [Self-Learning Expression Deformations for Data-Efficient Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05912/) (2026)
- [Detangled: A Framework for Creating, Editing, and Inferencing Feature Rich Hair Strands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09811/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time rendering of human head avatars is a cornerstone of many computer graphics applications, such as augmented reality, video games, and films, to name a few. Recent approaches address this challenge with computationally efficient geometry primitives in a carefully calibrated multi-view setup. Albeit producing photorealistic head renderings, it often fails to represent complex motion changes such as the mouth interior and strongly varying head poses. We propose a new method to generate highly dynamic and deformable human head avatars from multi-view imagery in real-time. At the core of our method is a hierarchical representation of head models that allows to capture the complex dynamics of facial expressions and head movements. First, with rich facial features extracted from raw input frames, we learn to deform the coarse facial geometry of the template mesh. We then initialize 3D Gaussians on the deformed surface and refine their positions in a fine step. We train this coarse-to-fine facial avatar model along with the head pose as a learnable parameter in an end-to-end framework. This enables not only controllable facial animation via video inputs, but also high-fidelity novel view synthesis of challenging facial expressions, such as tongue deformations and fine-grained teeth structure under large motion changes. Moreover, it encourages the learned head avatar to generalize towards new facial expressions and head poses at inference time. We demonstrate the performance of our method with comparisons against the related methods on different datasets, spanning challenging facial expression sequences across multiple identities. We also show the potential application of our approach by demonstrating a cross-identity facial performance transfer application.