FiCA: Feed-forward instant Gaussian Codec Avatars from a Single Portrait Image

Kim Youwang; Zhengyu Yang; Liuhao Ge; Yu Rong; Timur Bagautdinov; Su Zhaoen; Nir Sopher; Jovan Popović; Teng Deng; Tae-Hyun Oh; Chen Cao

arXiv · 2606.24232

FiCA: Feed-forward instant Gaussian Codec Avatars from a Single Portrait Image

Kim Youwang·Zhengyu Yang·Liuhao Ge·Yu Rong·Timur Bagautdinov·Su Zhaoen·Nir Sopher·Jovan Popović·Teng Deng·Tae-Hyun Oh·Chen Cao

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Abstract

We introduce FiCA, a Feed-forward, instant Gaussian Codec Avatar generation pipeline that creates lifelike avatars from a single portrait image. Generating a photorealistic and drivable avatar from just a single image is significantly challenging due to the limited visual information available to accurately infer the 3D appearance and geometry of human heads. To address this, we develop a novel system that combines human-centric vision foundation models with a diffusion model. This system is designed to fully exploit partial visual observations to generate lifelike human avatars. Our proposed diffusion model learns a generative mapping from these partial observations to complete and authentic 3D mesh reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a feed-forward mesh refinement network that enhances the fidelity and identity preservation of the generated avatars, eliminating the need for person-specific test-time optimization. By leveraging a universal prior model that decodes a generated mesh into a set of 3D Gaussians, we generate a photorealistic 3D Gaussian avatar, capable of being driven with novel expressions in real-time. Our experiments demonstrate that the avatars generated by our feed-forward approach faithfully represent diverse identities and surpass the visual quality of avatars produced by recent competing methods.

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Kim Youwang, Zhengyu Yang, Liuhao Ge, Yu Rong, Timur Bagautdinov, Su Zhaoen, Nir Sopher, Jovan Popović, Teng Deng, Tae-Hyun Oh, Chen Cao. 2026-08-29. FiCA: Feed-forward instant Gaussian Codec Avatars from a Single Portrait Image. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24232

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