Reconstructing a complete 3D head from a single portrait remains challenging because existing methods still face a sharp quality-speed trade-off: high-fidelity pipelines often rely on multi-stage processing and per-subject optimization, while fast feed-forward models struggle with complete geometry and fine appearance details. To bridge this gap, we propose Any3DAvatar, a fast and high-quality method for single-image 3D Gaussian head avatar generation, whose fastest setting reconstructs a full head in under one second while preserving high-fidelity geometry and texture. First, we build AnyHead, a unified data suite that combines identity diversity, dense multi-view supervision, and realistic accessories, filling the main gaps of existing head data in coverage, full-head geometry, and complex appearance. Second, rather than sampling unstructured noise, we initialize from a Plücker-aware structured 3D Gaussian scaffold and perform one-step conditional denoising, formulating full-head reconstruction into a single forward pass while retaining high fidelity. Third, we introduce auxiliary view-conditioned appearance supervision on the same latent tokens alongside 3D Gaussian reconstruction, improving novel-view texture details at zero extra inference cost. Experiments show that Any3DAvatar outperforms prior single-image full-head reconstruction methods in rendering fidelity while remaining substantially faster.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Pipeline of Any3DAvatar. Given a single portrait, we extract image and Gaussian tokens, jointly denoise them with a DiT backbone, and decode the outputs into 3D Gaussian point clouds through a few-step feed-forward path at inference. During training, we additionally supervise the same tokens with a view-conditioned image decoding branch.
Figure 3: Overview of the three complementary subsets of our AnyHead dataset.
Figure 4: Qualitative visual comparison between Any3DAvatar and other baselines.
NeRSemble
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
US ↑
Ava-256
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
US ↑
PanoHead
0.3241
13.0231
0.7446
0.8128
0.1274
4.6874
PanoHead
0.3209
11.3416
0.7641
0.8511
0.1800
5.2024
SphereHead
0.3690
11.6093
0.7265
0.6739
0.2334
1.5416
SphereHead
0.2909
10.9275
0.7793
0.8306
0.1992
4.8452
Arc2Avatar
0.4003
10.4641
0.6567
0.6195
0.2838
2.9166
Arc2Avatar
0.3488
9.2206
0.7176
0.6990
0.3785
2.2292
FaceLift
0.3056
13.4421
0.7558
0.8237
0.1107
3.6458
FaceLift
0.2125
16.1561
0.8123
0.8429
0.0910
6.2024
ID-Sculpt
0.3169
12.0811
0.7425
0.7759
0.1476
1.7916
ID-Sculpt
0.3017
11.0421
0.7682
0.8217
0.1855
5.0000
HQ-Head
0.3661
12.1271
0.7270
0.7636
0.1311
3.1250
HQ-Head
0.2738
13.5515
0.7953
0.8497
0.1807
4.1905
Table 1: Quantitative comparisons on the NeRSemble and Ava-256 datasets.
Figure 5: Qualitative visualization of the effect of different denoising step counts on the multi-view rendering quality of generated 3D heads.
Method
PanoHead
SphereHead
Arc2Avatar
Time (s) ↓
130.88
127.13
8274.67
FaceLift
ID-Sculpt
HQ-Head
Any3DAvatar
13.15
3198.79
3974.05
0.64
Table 2: Inference time comparison.
Step
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
Time (s) ↓
step=1
0.2038
18.6689
0.7541
0.8970
0.0690
0.64
step=5
0.2014
18.6976
0.7545
0.8998
0.0679
3.24
step=10
0.2029
18.6000
0.7537
0.8979
0.0684
6.90
step=20
0.2054
18.5606
0.7529
0.8970
0.0697
13.63
step=30
0.2073
18.6142
0.7529
0.8975
0.0705
19.67
Table 3: Comparison of different denoising steps on the AnyHead dataset.
Figure 6: Quantitative comparison of training with and without AVAS on different viewpoint angles (image index).
Figure 7: Visual results of AVAS ablation study. In non-input viewpoints, training with AVAS better preserves texture details in non-input views.
Figure 8: Downstream applications of our method.
Method
NeRSemble
FaceLift
0.3024/13.1803/0.7542/0.8196/0.1116
w/o FaceLift Data
0.2459/16.1976/0.7905/0.8819/0.0659
Method
Ava-256
FaceLift
0.2125/16.1561/0.8123/0.8429/0.0910
w/o FaceLift Data
0.1947/18.3987/0.8370/0.8740/0.0810
Table 4: Comparison with FaceLift using our model trained without FaceLift-generated data. Metrics are reported as LPIPS/PSNR/SSIM/CSIM/DreamSim.
Appendix figures & tables17 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 9: Examples of AI-generated heads used in our dataset construction pipeline.
Figure 10: Examples of digital human heads rendered in UE MetaHuman with diverse appearance attributes and expressions.
Figure 11: Examples of accessory-rich heads generated by controlled multi-view accessory augmentation.
Dataset
ID Number
Accessory
Full Head
Camera View
Stylized Head
Detailed View
Ava-256
256
✗
✓
80
✗
✓
NeRSemble
418
✗
✗
16
✗
✗
RenderMe-360
500
✓
✓
60
✗
✗
AnyHead
1060
✓
✓
80
✓
✓
Appendix
Table 5: Comparison with existing head datasets.
Method
PanoHead
SphereHead
Arc2Avatar
FaceLift
ID-Sculpt
HQ-Head
Any3DAvatar
Render Time (s) ↓
0.5628
0.7532
2.0444×10−3
3.8667×10−3
3.0602×10−3
1.8993×10−3
4.4328×10−3
Infer + Render Time (s) ↓
131.4428
127.8832
8274.6720
13.1539
3198.7931
3974.0519
0.6544
File Type
implicit
implicit
gs
gs
mesh
gs
gs
Appendix
Table 6: Comparison of runtime with full-head reconstruction methods.
Method
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
TRELLIS
0.3254
11.7264
0.6539
0.7643
0.2281
Open-Diffusion-GS
0.3191
12.2962
0.6443
0.7660
0.1680
Any3DAvatar
0.1894
19.8639
0.7632
0.9258
0.0633
Appendix
Table 7: Quantitative comparison with image-to-3D methods on the AnyHead dataset.
Figure 12: Visual comparison with image-to-3D methods.
Strategy
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
w/o AVAS
0.2014
18.6976
0.7545
0.8998
0.0679
w/ AVAS
0.1894
19.8639
0.7632
0.9258
0.0633
Appendix
Table 8: Ablation study on the effectiveness of the proposed AVAS strategy.
Dataset
PanoHead
SphereHead
Arc2Avatar
FaceLift
ID-Sculpt
HQ-Head
Any3DAvatar
AnyHead
0.5299
0.5696
0.6502
0.8053
0.6799
0.8695
0.9432
NeRSemble
0.6297
0.6324
0.6135
0.6771
0.6090
0.6409
0.9060
Appendix
Table 9: Quantitative comparison using multi-view 2D IoU on the AnyHead and NeRSemble datasets.
Figure 13: Visual comparison with non-full-head 3D head generation methods.
Figure 14: Visual comparison with non-full-head 3D head reconstruction methods.
Method
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
GPAvatar
0.3233
12.2337
0.7652
0.8175
0.1410
GAGAvatar
0.2968
12.8123
0.7727
0.8327
0.1149
CAP4D
0.3297
11.1998
0.7435
0.8251
0.1479
LAM
0.3070
14.5441
0.7733
0.8098
0.1386
FastAvatar
0.3611
12.5209
0.7328
0.7312
0.1833
Any3DAvatar
0.2357
16.6202
0.7988
0.8905
0.0621
Appendix
Table 10: Quantitative comparison with non-full-head 3D head reconstruction methods on the NeRSemble dataset.
Figure 15: Training convergence of different noise initialization strategies. The variants using pure image-space Gaussian noise or direct latent-space noise fail to converge, whereas incorporating Plücker ray embedding enables stable convergence.
Method
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
CSIM ↑
DS ↓
Trained FaceLift
0.2569
14.6061
0.7141
0.8711
0.1509
Any3DAvatar
0.1894
19.8639
0.7632
0.9258
0.0633
Appendix
Table 11: Quantitative comparison with FaceLift retrained and evaluated on the AnyHead dataset.
Table 12: Comparison of direct regression and conditional endpoint denoising under one- and five-step generation on the AnyHead dataset.
Figure 17: We evaluate our method on more stylized heads, including complex lighting, non-frontal viewpoints, anime-style heads, and 3D-stylized heads, demonstrating strong generation quality.
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
We propose S-Avatar, a novel method for generating photorealistic 3D head avatars from a single image using a diffusion-guided 3D model generation module and strategies for animating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While single-image head avatar reconstruction is crucial for lifelike Virtual Reality (VR) applications, existing approaches often struggle to preserve 3D consistency under unseen viewpoints. S-Avatar addresses this limitation through a three-stage pipeline. First, a high-resolution 3DGS is synthesized directly from a single image using a diffusion-based Gaussian splat generation module. Next, the parametric head model FLAME is aligned with the generated 3DGS by optimizing its parameters and spatial transformations. Finally, to adapt the 3DGS to FLAME variations, we construct a binding template that encodes the spatial relationship between the initial splats and FLAME. The dynamic 3D head avatar can then be rendered in real time by deforming the 3DGS with the binding template. By combining diffusion-guided canonical 3DGS generation with FLAME-based control, our method achieves efficient and accurate reconstruction with enhanced 3D consistency. Evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that S-Avatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel-view and expression generation, achieving superior realism and consistency. Consequently, our approach represents a significant advance in accessible avatar creation, applicable to a wide range of VR/AR applications. The project page is available at https://github.com/hailsong/savatar.
We propose OMG-Avatar, a novel One-shot method that leverages a Multi-LOD (Level-of-Detail) Gaussian representation for animatable 3D head reconstruction from a single image in 0.2s. Our method enables LOD head avatar modeling using a unified model that accommodates diverse hardware capabilities and inference speed requirements. To capture both global and local facial characteristics, we employ a transformer-based architecture for global feature extraction and projection-based sampling for local feature acquisition. These features are effectively fused under the guidance of a depth buffer, ensuring occlusion plausibility. We further introduce a coarse-to-fine learning paradigm to support Level-of-Detail functionality and enhance the perception of hierarchical details. To address the limitations of 3DMMs in modeling non-head regions such as the shoulders, we introduce a multi-region decomposition scheme in which the head and shoulders are predicted separately and then integrated through cross-region combination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMG-Avatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction quality, reenactment performance, and computational efficiency. The project homepage is https://human3daigc.github.io/OMGAvatar_project_page/ .