Building 3D animatable head avatars from a single image is an important yet challenging problem. Existing methods generally collapse under large camera pose variations, compromising the realism of 3D avatars. In this work, we propose a new framework to tackle the novel setting of one-shot 3D full-head animatable avatar reconstruction in a single feed-forward pass, enabling real-time animation and simultaneous 360° rendering views. To facilitate efficient animation control, we model 3D head avatars with Gaussian primitives embedded on the surface of a parametric face model within the UV space. To obtain knowledge of full-head geometry and textures, we leverage rich 3D full-head priors within a pretrained 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for global full-head feature extraction and multi-view supervision. To increase the fidelity of the 3D reconstruction of the input image, we take advantage of the symmetric nature of the UV space and human faces to fuse local fine-grained input image features with the global full-head textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving high-quality 3D full-head modeling as well as real-time animation, thereby improving the realism of 3D talking avatars.
Overview of the framework. Given an input source image, the UV space feature extraction module extracts its global and local UV feature maps for animatable 3D full-head reconstruction. The symmetric UV space feature fusion module takes advantage of the symmetry of human faces and the UV space to combine these UV feature maps. From the predicted UV Gaussian attribute maps, 3D Gaussian primitives are sampled, which can be animated with a parametric face model and rendered given a camera pose.
@article{zhao2026generalizable,
title={Generalizable and Animatable 3D Full-Head Gaussian Avatar from a Single Image},
author={Zhao, Shuling and Xu, Dan},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12770},
year={2026}
}