# DiGS-Avatar: Single-Image Animatable 3D Human Reconstruction via UV-Space Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20759/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [Wonder3D: Single Image to 3D using Cross-Domain Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15008/) (2023)
- [One-2-3-45: Any Single Image to 3D Mesh in 45 Seconds without Per-Shape Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16928/) (2023)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [Zero123++: a Single Image to Consistent Multi-view Diffusion Base Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15110/) (2023)
- [InstantMesh: Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image with Sparse-view Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07191/) (2024)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [One-2-3-45++: Fast Single Image to 3D Objects with Consistent Multi-View Generation and 3D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07885/) (2023)
- [Triplane Meets Gaussian Splatting: Fast and Generalizable Single-View 3D Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09147/) (2023)
- [ARCH: Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04572/) (2020)
- [PaMIR: Parametric Model-Conditioned Implicit Representation for Image-based Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03858/) (2020)
- [DMV3D: Denoising Multi-View Diffusion using 3D Large Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09217/) (2023)
- [ECON: Explicit Clothed humans Optimized via Normal integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07422/) (2022)
- [DeepHuman: 3D Human Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06473/) (2019)
- [ARCH++: Animation-Ready Clothed Human Reconstruction Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07845/) (2021)
- [Tex2Shape: Detailed Full Human Body Geometry From a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08645/) (2019)
- [Variational Autoencoder for Deep Learning of Images, Labels and Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08976/) (2016)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [SHERF: Generalizable Human NeRF from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12791/) (2023)
- [SIZER: A Dataset and Model for Parsing 3D Clothing and Learning Size Sensitive 3D Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11610/) (2020)
- [SIFU: Side-view Conditioned Implicit Function for Real-world Usable Clothed Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06704/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single-image 3D human reconstruction often suffers from over-smoothed textures and geometric inconsistencies. While diffusion models improve generative quality, their reliance on multi-view synthesis prior to 3D reconstruction is computationally expensive and prone to view inconsistency. We propose DiGS-Avatar, which reformulates this task as an efficient, diffusion-based UV-latent completion task, ensuring 3D consistency by design. To capture accurate spatial structure, we introduce a teacher-student framework where a multi-view teacher provides geometrically aligned pseudo-ground-truth latents to supervise a single-view diffusion student. Treating this inferred latent as a robust structural skeleton, our method injects high-level semantic features to accurately recover fine textural details without disrupting spatial integrity. The refined representation is then decoded into 3D Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiGS-Avatar achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive visual fidelity and zero-shot generalization, while reconstructing a fully animatable 3D avatar in just 0.71 seconds. Code is available at https://github.com/KLMAV-CUC/DiGS-Avatar.