# TimeWalker: Personalized Neural Space for Lifelong Head Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02421 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02421/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [MobileNeRF: Exploiting the Polygon Rasterization Pipeline for Efficient Neural Field Rendering on Mobile Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00277/) (2022)
- [BiSeNet V2: Bilateral Network with Guided Aggregation for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02147/) (2020)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FaceScape: a Large-scale High Quality 3D Face Dataset and Detailed Riggable 3D Face Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13989/) (2020)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [PointAvatar: Deformable Point-based Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08377/) (2022)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [High-quality Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Surfels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17774/) (2024)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [i3DMM: Deep Implicit 3D Morphable Model of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14143/) (2020)
- [FlashAvatar: High-fidelity Head Avatar with Efficient Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02214/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present TimeWalker, a novel framework that models realistic, full-scale 3D head avatars of a person on lifelong scale. Unlike current human head avatar pipelines that capture identity at the momentary level(e.g., instant photography or short videos), TimeWalker constructs a person's comprehensive identity from unstructured data collection over his/her various life stages, offering a paradigm to achieve full reconstruction and animation of that person at different moments of life. At the heart of TimeWalker's success is a novel neural parametric model that learns personalized representation with the disentanglement of shape, expression, and appearance across ages. Central to our methodology are the concepts of two aspects: (1) We track back to the principle of modeling a person's identity in an additive combination of average head representation in the canonical space, and moment-specific head attribute representations driven from a set of neural head basis. To learn the set of head basis that could represent the comprehensive head variations in a compact manner, we propose a Dynamic Neural Basis-Blending Module (Dynamo). It dynamically adjusts the number and blend weights of neural head bases, according to both shared and specific traits of the target person over ages. (2) Dynamic 2D Gaussian Splatting (DNA-2DGS), an extension of Gaussian splatting representation, to model head motion deformations like facial expressions without losing the realism of rendering and reconstruction. DNA-2DGS includes a set of controllable 2D oriented planar Gaussian disks that utilize the priors from parametric model, and move/rotate with the change of expression. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we show TimeWalker's ability to reconstruct and animate avatars across decoupled dimensions with realistic rendering effects, demonstrating a way to achieve personalized 'time traveling' in a breeze.