# Real-Time Human Reconstruction and Animation using Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10259/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for Single Image to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04400/) (2023)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Neural Articulated Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03110/) (2021)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [LVSM: A Large View Synthesis Model with Minimal 3D Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17242/) (2024)
- [TAVA: Template-free Animatable Volumetric Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08929/) (2022)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [GPS-Gaussian: Generalizable Pixel-wise 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Human Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02155/) (2023)
- [GauHuman: Articulated Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02973/) (2023)
- [Neural Human Performer: Learning Generalizable Radiance Fields for Human Performance Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07448/) (2021)
- [H-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Rendering and Temporal Reconstruction of Humans in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13746/) (2021)
- [HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17910/) (2023)
- [Editable Free-viewpoint Video Using a Layered Neural Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14786/) (2021)
- [ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10036/) (2022)
- [InstantAvatar: Learning Avatars from Monocular Video in 60 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10550/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present HumanGS, a generalizable feed-forward Gaussian splatting framework for human 3D reconstruction and real-time animation from sparse multi-view RGB images and their associated SMPL-X poses. Unlike prior methods that rely on depth supervision, fixed input views, UV maps, repeated feed-forward inference for each target pose or view, or computationally expensive vertex-to-image cross-attention, HumanGS employs a simple transformer architecture that explicitly associates SMPL-X vertices with multi-scale image features through geometric back-projection. This eliminates the need for large pre-trained human representation models while naturally aggregating complementary information from multiple views. The aggregated vertex features are mapped by a lightweight MLP decoder to a canonical set of 3D Gaussian primitives aligned with SMPL-X vertices. One Gaussian is regularized to remain close to the SMPL-X surface, providing a strong geometric prior and stable correspondence to the parametric body model, while a small set of unconstrained Gaussians per vertex captures geometric details beyond the body surface, such as clothing and hair. The resulting canonical representation is animated efficiently using linear blend skinning and Gaussian rasterization without further network inference. Trained entirely from scratch on only 10K frames from THuman2.1, HumanGS achieves reconstruction quality comparable to or better than state-of-the-art methods while reducing reconstruction time by over 15 times compared to recent transformer-based approaches, enabling real-time animation and interactive applications. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Devdoot57/HumanGS .