FlexAvatar: Flexible Large Reconstruction Model for Animatable Gaussian Head Avatars with Detailed Deformation

Abstract

We present FlexAvatar, a flexible large reconstruction model for high-fidelity 3D head avatars with detailed dynamic deformation from single or sparse images, without requiring camera poses or expression labels. It leverages a transformer-based reconstruction model with structured head query tokens as canonical anchor to aggregate flexible input-number-agnostic, camera-pose-free and expression-free inputs into a robust canonical 3D representation. For detailed dynamic deformation, we introduce a lightweight UNet decoder conditioned on UV-space position maps, which can produce detailed expression-dependent deformations in real time. To better capture rare but critical expressions like wrinkles and bared teeth, we also adopt a data distribution adjustment strategy during training to balance the distribution of these expressions in the training set. Moreover, a lightweight 10-second refinement can further enhances identity-specific details in extreme identities without affecting deformation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FlexAvatar achieves superior 3D consistency, detailed dynamic realism compared with previous methods, providing a practical solution for animatable 3D avatar creation.