Towards Generative and Expressive 3D Facial Animations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Expressive 3D facial animation is a key component for realistic avatars in immersive XR. While face motion capture can produce high-quality results, this approach is impractical in settings without on-device capture hardware for real-time tracking and does not address the growing demand for conversational AI avatars. In parallel, there is rapid progress in 2D talking head generation, producing expressive videos of faces driven by audio. However, these methods are for flat-screen media and cannot be directly applied to XR avatars. In this work, we leverage advances in 2D generative methods and explore a video-to-3D facial animation pipeline. We extract ARKit blendshape parameters and head poses from generated or real videos, and apply them to 3D rigs. To improve efficiency, we further investigate training an audio-to-rig model directly, bypassing pixel-space generation. Early experiments demonstrate both feasibility and challenges. We discuss how such generative pipelines could enable flexible, emotionally expressive avatars for XR, with applications to conversational AI, NPCs, and telepresence.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it