# Roll Your Eyes: Gaze Redirection via Explicit 3D Eyeball Rotation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06136/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [ETH-XGaze: A Large Scale Dataset for Gaze Estimation under Extreme Head Pose and Gaze Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15837/) (2020)
- [FaceX-Zoo: A PyTorch Toolbox for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04407/) (2021)
- [Self-Learning Transformations for Improving Gaze and Head Redirection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12307/) (2020)
- [ReDirTrans: Latent-to-Latent Translation for Gaze and Head Redirection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11452/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Eye Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Human Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00773/) (2023)
- [Emotional Conversation: Empowering Talking Faces with Cohesive Expression, Gaze and Pose Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07895/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel 3D gaze redirection framework that leverages an explicit 3D eyeball structure. Existing gaze redirection methods are typically based on neural radiance fields, which employ implicit neural representations via volume rendering. Unlike these NeRF-based approaches, where the rotation and translation of 3D representations are not explicitly modeled, we introduce a dedicated 3D eyeball structure to represent the eyeballs with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our method generates photorealistic images that faithfully reproduce the desired gaze direction by explicitly rotating and translating the 3D eyeball structure. In addition, we propose an adaptive deformation module that enables the replication of subtle muscle movements around the eyes. Through experiments conducted on the ETH-XGaze dataset, we demonstrate that our framework is capable of generating diverse novel gaze images, achieving superior image quality and gaze estimation accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.