# MoGaFace: Momentum-Guided and Texture-Aware Gaussian Avatars for Consistent Facial Geometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01218 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01218/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing Personalized Semantic Facial NeRF Models From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06108/) (2022)
- [MonoGaussianAvatar: Monocular Gaussian Point-based Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04558/) (2023)
- [SyncTalk: The Devil is in the Synchronization for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17590/) (2023)
- [TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15264/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Blendshapes for Head Avatar Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19398/) (2024)
- [LatentAvatar: Learning Latent Expression Code for Expressive Neural Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01190/) (2023)
- [GaussianHead: High-fidelity Head Avatars with Learnable Gaussian Derivation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01632/) (2023)
- [Generalizable Human Gaussians for Sparse View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12777/) (2024)
- [EnvGS: Modeling View-Dependent Appearance with Environment Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15215/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Head Avatars with Expressive Dynamic Appearances by Compact Tensorial Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14967/) (2025)
- [Explicifying Neural Implicit Fields for Efficient Dynamic Human Avatar Modeling via a Neural Explicit Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05112/) (2023)
- [SyncAnimation: A Real-Time End-to-End Framework for Audio-Driven Human Pose and Talking Head Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14646/) (2025)
- [PCR-GS: COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting via Pose Co-Regularizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13891/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing 3D head avatar reconstruction methods adopt a two-stage process, relying on tracked FLAME meshes derived from facial landmarks, followed by Gaussian-based rendering. However, misalignment between the estimated mesh and target images often leads to suboptimal rendering quality and loss of fine visual details. In this paper, we present MoGaFace, a novel 3D head avatar modeling framework that continuously refines facial geometry and texture attributes throughout the Gaussian rendering process. To address the misalignment between estimated FLAME meshes and target images, we introduce the Momentum-Guided Consistent Geometry module, which incorporates a momentum-updated expression bank and an expression-aware correction mechanism to ensure temporal and multi-view consistency. Additionally, we propose Latent Texture Attention, which encodes compact multi-view features into head-aware representations, enabling geometry-aware texture refinement via integration into Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that MoGaFace achieves high-fidelity head avatar reconstruction and significantly improves novel-view synthesis quality, even under inaccurate mesh initialization and unconstrained real-world settings.