# TexAvatars : Hybrid Texel-3D Representations for Stable Rigging of Photorealistic Gaussian Head Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21099 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21099/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2025.

## 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)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [Pixel Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04638/) (2021)
- [Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03704/) (2023)
- [RigNeRF: Fully Controllable Neural 3D Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06481/) (2022)
- [FlashAvatar: High-fidelity Head Avatar with Efficient Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02214/) (2023)
- [Learning Neural Parametric Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02761/) (2022)
- [EMOPortraits: Emotion-enhanced Multimodal One-shot Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19110/) (2024)
- [HeadGaS: Real-Time Animatable Head Avatars via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02902/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Blendshapes for Head Avatar Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19398/) (2024)
- [GGHead: Fast and Generalizable 3D Gaussian Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09377/) (2024)
- [NPGA: Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19331/) (2024)
- [Learning Personalized High Quality Volumetric Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01436/) (2023)
- [DiffusionAvatars: Deferred Diffusion for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18635/) (2023)
- [FLARE: Fast Learning of Animatable and Relightable Mesh Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17519/) (2023)
- [MeGA: Hybrid Mesh-Gaussian Head Avatar for High-Fidelity Rendering and Head Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19026/) (2024)

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

- [Wispy to Voluminous: Prior-free Multi-view Capture of Strand-level Facial Hair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08041/) (2026)
- [URHead: A Unified UV-Space Representation for Joint Mesh-3DGS Optimization in Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22673/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Constructing drivable and photorealistic 3D head avatars has become a central task in AR/XR, enabling immersive and expressive user experiences. With the emergence of high-fidelity and efficient representations such as 3D Gaussians, recent works have pushed toward ultra-detailed head avatars. Existing approaches typically fall into two categories: rule-based analytic rigging or neural network-based deformation fields. While effective in constrained settings, both approaches often fail to generalize to unseen expressions and poses, particularly in extreme reenactment scenarios. Other methods constrain Gaussians to the global texel space of 3DMMs to reduce rendering complexity. However, these texel-based avatars tend to underutilize the underlying mesh structure. They apply minimal analytic deformation and rely heavily on neural regressors and heuristic regularization in UV space, which weakens geometric consistency and limits extrapolation to complex, out-of-distribution deformations. To address these limitations, we introduce TexAvatars, a hybrid avatar representation that combines the explicit geometric grounding of analytic rigging with the spatial continuity of texel space. Our approach predicts local geometric attributes in UV space via CNNs, but drives 3D deformation through mesh-aware Jacobians, enabling smooth and semantically meaningful transitions across triangle boundaries. This hybrid design separates semantic modeling from geometric control, resulting in improved generalization, interpretability, and stability. Furthermore, TexAvatars captures fine-grained expression effects, including muscle-induced wrinkles, glabellar lines, and realistic mouth cavity geometry, with high fidelity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under extreme pose and expression variations, demonstrating strong generalization in challenging head reenactment settings.