# Learning Semantic Inpainting for Animatable Gaussian Head Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38343/

## 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 29 Sep 2026.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [Probing the 3D Awareness of Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08636/) (2024)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Fine-Grained Image Forgery Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17111/) (2023)
- [FakeShield: Explainable Image Forgery Detection and Localization via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02761/) (2024)
- [FlashAvatar: High-fidelity Head Avatar with Efficient Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02214/) (2023)
- [Generalizable and Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07971/) (2024)
- [DINOv2 Meets Text: A Unified Framework for Image- and Pixel-Level Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16334/) (2024)
- [GPAvatar: Generalizable and Precise Head Avatar from Image(s)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10215/) (2024)
- [One-Shot High-Fidelity Talking-Head Synthesis with Deformable Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05097/) (2023)
- [OTAvatar: One-shot Talking Face Avatar with Controllable Tri-plane Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14662/) (2023)
- [LEGION: Learning to Ground and Explain for Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15264/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present SInGA, a novel method for learning Semantic Inpainting for animatable Gaussian head Avatars from a single image. Existing avatar approaches often rely on multi-view observations and lack effective handling of unobserved regions in single-view settings, limiting their applicability in such scenarios. To address this, we propose a semantic inpainting framework defined in UV space for completing unobserved facial regions. Our key insight lies in the structured topology of the UV representation, which provides consistent spatial correspondences and enables reliable completion of identity-specific features using the inherent symmetry cues of human faces. We extract features from observed regions and use them to complete unobserved regions. The completed representation is then used to regress Gaussian attributes, effectively performing Gaussian inpainting. In addition, instead of relying on a single Gaussian at each surface or pixel location, we stack multiple Gaussians to enhance detail. The resulting avatar generalizes across identities without requiring per-identity optimization and can be animated with driving inputs. Experimental results show that our method generates high-quality head avatars with improved completeness and identity preservation, while supporting realistic animation and consistent rendering from unobserved views.