Existing full-body Gaussian avatar methods primarily optimize global reconstruction quality and often fail to preserve fine-grained facial geometry and expression details. This challenge arises from limited facial representational capacity that causes difficulties in modeling high-frequency pose-dependent deformations. To address this, we propose F3G-Avatar, a full-body, face-aware avatar synthesis method that reconstructs animatable human representations from multi-view RGB video and regressed pose/shape parameters. Starting from a clothed Momentum Human Rig (MHR) template, front/back positional maps are rendered and decoded into 3D Gaussians through a two-branch architecture: a body branch that captures pose-dependent non-rigid deformations and a face-focused deformation branch that refines head geometry and appearance. The predicted Gaussians are fused, posed with linear blend skinning (LBS), and rendered with differentiable Gaussian splatting. Training combines reconstruction and perceptual objectives with a face-specific adversarial loss to enhance realism in close-up views. Experiments demonstrate strong rendering quality, with face-view performance reaching PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS of 26.243/0.964/0.084 on the AvatarReX dataset. Ablations further highlight contributions of the MHR template and the face-focused deformation. F3G-Avatar provides a practical, high-quality pipeline for realistic, animatable full-body avatar synthesis.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of F3G-Avatar. (a) MHR clothed body template. (b) Global Canonical Deformation (Body): front/back body positional maps are processed by the BodyUNet to predict pose-dependent body Gaussians. (c) Face-focused Deformation: head positional maps drive three StyleUNets to predict positional, color, and auxiliary face attributes. (d) Region-aware Reconstruction : The two branches are fused, posed via LBS, rendered with 3DGS, and optimized with reconstruction losses and a face-specific adversarial loss.
Figure 3: Visualization of the canonical face model construction from the MHR template and head positional maps.
Novel View (Body)
Novel View (Head)
Model
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
AvatarRex [ 40 ]
23.248
0.957
0.065
-
-
-
3DGS-Avatar [ 28 ]
28.784
0.951
0.042
24.972
0.943
0.121
GaussianAvatar [ 6 ]
26.950
0.939
0.041
24.011
0.933
0.144
AnimatableGaussians [ 16 ]
30.361
0.968
0.034
25.671
0.957
0.114
Ours (F3G-Avatar)
30.214
0.970
0.032
26.243
0.964
0.084
Table 1: Quantitative comparison of full-body and face-focused novel-view synthesis on the AvatarReX [ 40 ] dataset.
Novel View (Body)
Novel View (Head)
Model
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
TAVA [ 13 ]
26.61
0.968
0.032
-
-
-
Ani-NeRF [ 25 ]
22.53
0.964
0.034
20.14
0.931
0.102
AnimatableGaussians [ 16 ]
30.614
0.980
0.029
26.434
0.953
0.071
Ours (F3G-Avatar)
30.311
0.981
0.026
26.934
0.961
0.062
Table 2: Quantitative comparison of full-body and face-focused novel-view synthesis on the THuman4.0 [ 39 ] dataset.
Reconstructing animatable 3D human avatars from monocular video is a fundamental problem in computer vision with broad applications in AR/VR and digital content creation. Existing approaches typically couple parametric body models with neural rendering or 3D Gaussian splatting and optimize all body regions jointly from short videos, which often degrades fidelity in the visible areas. To overcome this limitation, we introduce FlexiAvatar, a unified framework that explicitly optimizes only the visible body regions, effectively eliminating artifacts arising from unobserved limbs. Our method integrates occlusion-robust SMPL-X tracking with part-specific residual refinement to capture high-frequency geometric and appearance details. To complete entirely unseen regions (e.g., back views), we leverage a diffusion-based approach to generate texture consistent with the observed appearance. Experiments on full-body (NeuMan, ZJU-MoCap, WildAvatar), upper/half-body (talk-show clips), and head-only (INSTA) inputs show that FlexiAvatar delivers consistently higher reconstruction quality, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by an average PSNR improvement of approximately 3% across datasets. Finally, by restricting optimization to observed regions, our method reduces the effective number of Gaussians that must be optimized and rendered, leading to reduced runtime and memory overhead in partial-visibility scenarios.
Yihalem Yimolal Tiruneh, Muhammad Salman Ali, Uyoung Jeong +5
UNIST, South Korea · University of Aberdeen, UK · University College London, UK +1
The generation of high-fidelity, animatable 3D human avatars remains a core challenge in computer graphics and vision, with applications in VR, telepresence, and entertainment. Existing approaches based on implicit representations like NeRFs suffer from slow rendering and dynamic inconsistencies, while 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods are typically limited to static head generation, lacking dynamic control. We bridge this gap by introducing AGORA, a novel framework that extends 3DGS within a generative adversarial network to produce animatable avatars. Our key contribution is a lightweight, FLAME-conditioned deformation branch that predicts per-Gaussian residuals, enabling identity-preserving, fine-grained expression control while allowing real-time inference. Identity is further preserved through spatial shape conditioning of the identity branch, and expression fidelity is enforced via a dual-discriminator training scheme leveraging synthetic renderings of the parametric mesh. AGORA generates avatars that are not only visually realistic but also precisely controllable. Quantitatively, we outperform state-of-the-art NeRF-based methods on expression accuracy while rendering at 250 FPS on a single GPU and, notably, at ∼9 FPS under CPU-only inference -- to our knowledge the first demonstration of CPU-only animatable 3DGS avatar synthesis. This work represents a significant step toward practical, high-performance digital humans. Project website: https://ramazan793.github.io/AGORA/
Ramazan Fazylov, Sergey Zagoruyko, Aleksandr Parkin +2
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Polynome AI, Dubai, UAE · MTS AI, Moscow, Russia
Avatar reconstruction has traditionally relied on per-subject optimization that requires hours of computation or on expensive preprocessing that limits scalability. We introduce FFAvatar, a generalizable feed-forward framework that reconstructs high-quality, animatable 3D Gaussian head avatars from few-shot unposed portrait images in seconds. FFAvatar fuses information from multiple source images into a unified canonical Gaussian representation through Multi-View Query-Former, which is animated via FLAME parameters predicted end-to-end directly from pixels, eliminating the overhead of offline FLAME extraction. We further propose a three-stage training curriculum that achieves both broad generalization and high-fidelity reconstruction: (i) scalable pretraining on extensive monocular video data with over 1M identities to learn strong generalizable priors; (ii) multi-view fine-tuning on a small but high-quality dataset of 360-degree captures to enhance geometric fidelity and extreme-view awareness; and (iii) optional personalization that adapts to specific identities for maximum fidelity within 500 optimization steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FFAvatar sets a new standard for identity preservation, geometric consistency, and animation fidelity. On the NeRSemble benchmark, it outperforms the state-of-the-art LAM by a substantial 5.5 PSNR gain. Furthermore, FFAvatar enables real-time deployment, reconstructing avatars in 2 seconds without personalization and 10 seconds with personalization, while supporting 49 FPS animation on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU.
Thuan Hoang Nguyen, Jiahao Luo, Yinyu Nie +3
Snap Inc. · MBZUAI · University of California, Santa Cruz