# One-Shot Feed-Forward 360circ Animatable Avatar via Inpainted UV-Space Gaussian Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12770/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14367/) (2022)
- [PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08379/) (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)
- [Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06605/) (2022)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09043/) (2022)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04036/) (2022)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [Next3D: Generative Neural Texture Rasterization for 3D-Aware Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11208/) (2022)
- [Realistic One-shot Mesh-based Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08343/) (2022)
- [Fast Bi-layer Neural Synthesis of One-Shot Realistic Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10174/) (2020)
- [FlashAvatar: High-fidelity Head Avatar with Efficient Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02214/) (2023)
- [HeadGAN: One-shot Neural Head Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08261/) (2020)
- [Real3D-Portrait: One-shot Realistic 3D Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08503/) (2024)
- [Generalizable and Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07971/) (2024)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Building one-shot 3D animatable head avatars is an important yet challenging problem. Existing methods generally collapse under large camera pose variations, compromising the realism of 3D avatars. In this work, we propose a new framework to tackle the novel setting of one-shot 3D full-head animatable avatar reconstruction in a single forward pass via inpainted UV-space Gaussian modeling, enabling 360^circ rendering views and real-time animation. To facilitate efficient animation control, we model 3D head avatars with Gaussian primitives embedded on the surface of a parametric face model within the UV space, and project the input image features to the UV space, resulting in incomplete local UV feature maps. To inpaint the missing regions, we obtain knowledge of full-head geometry and textures from rich 3D full-head priors within a pretrained 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for global full-head feature extraction and multi-view supervision. Specifically, to enhance the fidelity of 3D reconstruction during inpainting, we take advantage of the symmetric nature of the UV space and human faces to fuse incomplete yet detailed local UV feature maps with the extracted global full-head textures, resulting in inpainted UV Gaussian attribute maps for avatar modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is the first to achieve high-quality 3D full-head animatable avatar modeling, significantly improving side and back views while outperforming state-of-the-art animation approaches, thereby improving the realism of 3D animatable avatars.