📢Announcing our 3D head avatar benchmark📢 Two tasks with... hidden test sets: - Dynamic Novel View Synthesis on Heads - Monocular FLAME-driven Head Avatar Reconstruction Our goal is to make research on 3D head avatars more comparable and ultimately increase the realism of digital humans. The benchmark studies distinct phenomena of 3D head avatar creation, such as extreme facial expressions, slow motion captures of shaking long hair, or complicated light reflection and refraction patterns of glasses. The two benchmark tasks assess two core desiderata of 3D avatars: While the novel view synthesis challenge focuses on best possible rendering quality of complex moving scenes, the avatar animation challenge is concerned with how well a driving signal is translated into an avatar. Evaluations are light-weight and consist of diverse video recordings from the popular NeRSemble dataset with a hidden test set. Participation in the benchmark is therefore straight-forward and requires only 5 reconstructions per task. Leaderboard and benchmark submission: Benchmark data access and toolkit: Great work by Tobias Kirschstein Simon Giebenhainshow more

Gaussian Head Avatar: Ultra High-fidelity Head Avatar via Dynamic... Gaussians paper page: Creating high-fidelity 3D head avatars has always been a research hotspot, but there remains a great challenge under lightweight sparse view setups. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Head Avatar represented by controllable 3D Gaussians for high-fidelity head avatar modeling. We optimize the neutral 3D Gaussians and a fully learned MLP-based deformation field to capture complex expressions. The two parts benefit each other, thereby our method can model fine-grained dynamic details while ensuring expression accuracy. Furthermore, we devise a well-designed geometry-guided initialization strategy based on implicit SDF and Deep Marching Tetrahedra for the stability and convergence of the training procedure. Experiments show our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art sparse-view methods, achieving ultra high-fidelity rendering quality at 2K resolution even under exaggerated expressions.show more

📢📢𝐍𝐞𝐑𝐒𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐯𝟐 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞📢📢 Head captures of 7.1MP from... 16 cameras at 73fps: * More recordings (425 people) * Better color calibration * Convenient download scripts The new version of our dataset adds 156 participants for a total of 425 different people. In its entirety, the dataset provides now 65 million images from over 15 hours of diverse human facial expression performances. We improved the color consistency of the recorded images with a better color calibration procedure. As a result, 3D reconstructions with images from the NeRSemble dataset should become better and look more realistic. Finally, we made it much easier to download the recordings with our new download repository. It now just takes a single command to download all frontal hair shake videos of all participants or to download all recordings of a single participant. Check it out: Awesome work by Tobias Kirschstein Simon Giebenhain !!!show more

📢Pix2NPHM: Learning to Regress NPHM Reconstructions From a Single... Image📢 We directly regress neural parametric head models (NPHMs) from a single image — fast, stable, and significantly more expressive than classical 3DMMs such as FLAME. Face tracking & 3D reconstruction are often limited by the representational capacity of PCA-based face models. By lifting NPHMs to a first-class reconstruction primitive, we enable more accurate geometry, richer expressions, and finer animation control. Pix2NPHM obtains fast and reliable NPHM reconstructions on real-world data. Inference-time optimization against surface normals and canonical point maps can further increase fidelity. Key to successful and generalized training of our ViT-based network are: (1) large-scale registration of existing 3D head datasets, and (2) self-supervised training on vast in-the-wild 2D video datasets using pseudo ground-truth surface normals. Finally, we show that geometry-aware pretraining on pixel-aligned reconstruction tasks significantly outperforms generic visual pretraining (e.g., DINO-style features) in terms of generalization. 🌍 🎥 Great work by Simon Giebenhain, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Zhe Chenshow more

Wonderland: Navigating 3D Scenes from a Single Image Contributions:... • First, we introduce a representation for controllable 3D generation by leveraging the generative priors from camera-guided video diffusion models. Unlike image models, video diffusion models are trained on extensive video datasets. This enables them to capture comprehensive spatial relationships within scenes across multiple views and embed a form of "3D awareness" in their latent space, which allows us to maintain 3D consistency in novel view synthesis. • Second, to achieve controllable novel view generation, we empower video models with precise control over specified camera motions. We introduce a novel dual-branch conditioning mechanism that effectively incorporates desired diverse camera trajectories into the video diffusion model. This enables expansion of a single image into a multi-view consistent capture of a 3D scene with precise pose control. • Third, to achieve efficient 3D reconstruction, we directly transform video latents into 3DGS. We propose a novel latent-based large reconstruction model (LaLRM) that lifts video latents to 3D in a feed-forward manner. With this design, during inference, our model directly predicts 3DGS from a single input image, effectively aligning the generation and reconstruction tasks—and bridging image space and 3D space—through the video latent space. Compared with reconstructing scenes from images, the video latent space offers a 256× spatial-temporal reduction while retaining essential and consistent 3D structural details. Such a high degree of compression is crucial, as it allows the LaLRM to handle a wider range of 3D scenes within the reconstruction framework, with the same memory constraints.show more

Humanoids 🤖 will do anything humans can do. But... are state-of-the-art algorithms up to the challenge? Introducing HumanoidBench, the first-of-its-kind simulated humanoid benchmark with 27 distinct whole-body tasks requiring intricate long-horizon planning and coordination. 🧵👇show more

My sister and I are putting great care into... the physics of our 3D customizable vtuber avatar! -^u^- We wanna make the tails as flowy as possible! 🐾 Here is the link to our model's preview page! A guide on how to use the model will be uploaded soon 🩷show more

Here is a preview of the new bang options... for our 3D customizable vtuber model! ✨ Not everyone can afford a high end 1:1 3D vtuber model. Which is why my sister and I are working so hard to provide a customizable 3D vtuber avatar with the same level of quality and tech!🩷show more

📢GeomHair: Reconstruction of Hair Strands from Colorless 3D Scans📢... We present a novel method to reconstruct hair strands from colorless 3D scans by extracting orientation cues directly from the mesh surface geometry by finding local characteristic lines and from shaded renderings using a neural 2D line detector. We enhance the reconstruction with a diffusion prior trained on synthetic hair data and adapted to each scan using a tailored text prompt, allowing us to recover both simple and complex hairstyles without relying on color input. To support further research, we also introduce Strands400, the largest publicly available dataset of 3D hair strand reconstructions from real-world scans of 400 different people, featuring complicated hairstyles, such as ponytails and buns. 🌍 📷 Great work by Rachmadio Noval L. Artem Sevastopolsky Egor Zakharov @ness_prisshow more

SPARK can create high-quality 3D face avatars from regular... videos and track expressions and poses in real time. It improves the accuracy of 3D face reconstructions for tasks like aging, face swapping, and digital makeup. 6 examples:show more

D4RL is a great benchmark, but is saturated. Introducing... OGBench, a new benchmark for offline goal-conditioned RL and offline RL! Tasks include HumanoidMaze, Puzzle, Drawing, and more 🙂 Project page: GitHub: 🧵↓show more

Apple just trained a 3D Gaussian head reconstruction model... on 10,000+ subjects. Feed-forward. No test-time optimization. New identity in, reconstructed Gaussian head out. The UV-parameterized Gaussian representation decouples the number of Gaussians from the number and resolution of input images, making it practical to train with many high resolution views. And the heads are not just static either: text-conditioned identity generation, plus blendshape-driven latent animation across identities. We've been building in the 3D Gaussian Splatting space for a while. The gap between "research demo" and "works on real people at scale" is closing fast.show more

new collab from Paradigm and OpenAI: evmbench is a... benchmark and agent harness for exploiting smart contract bugs a few months ago, the best models found <20% of critical, fund-draining @Code4rena bugs in our benchmark. today they find > 70%show more

DroneSplat: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Robust 3D Reconstruction from... In-the-Wild Drone Imagery Abstract: Drones have become essential tools for reconstructing wild scenes due to their outstanding maneuverability. Recent advances in radiance field methods have achieved remarkable rendering quality, providing a new avenue for 3D reconstruction from drone imagery. However, dynamic distractors in wild environments challenge the static scene assumption in radiance fields, while limited view constraints hinder the accurate capture of underlying scene geometry. To address these challenges, we introduce DroneSplat, a novel framework designed for robust 3D reconstruction from in-the-wild drone imagery. Our method adaptively adjusts masking thresholds by integrating local-global segmentation heuristics with statistical approaches, enabling precise identification and elimination of dynamic distractors in static scenes. We enhance 3D Gaussian Splatting with multi-view stereo predictions and a voxel-guided optimization strategy, supporting high-quality rendering under limited view constraints. For comprehensive evaluation, we provide a drone-captured 3D reconstruction dataset encompassing both dynamic and static scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DroneSplat outperforms both 3DGS and NeRF baselines in handling in-the-wild drone imagery.show more

💻Tired of running so many slow, expensive benchmark evals... across every checkpoint? Try ✨BenchPress✨ at provide a few benchmark scores, then get predictions for the remaining ~100 benchmarks, with trust probabilities and calibrated 90% prediction intervals. How does this work? In his original post ( Dimitris Papailiopoulos first tried the idea as a fun question: collect model-by-benchmark scores into a matrix, find its low-rank structure, and use matrix completion to predict missing benchmark scores from a few observed ones. We expanded this into a full system: a fully audited 84-model x 133-benchmark score matrix, an optimized matrix-completion predictor, and a reliability layer for trust probabilities and 90% prediction intervals. Beyond predicting missing scores, we also suggest practical seed benchmark sets. The five-probe set {GPQA-D, HLE, Codeforces, MMLU-Pro, ARC-AGI-1} recovers the rest of a model's public score profile with a MedAE of 3.93 points. A lower-cost set {GPQA-D, MMLU-Pro, Aider Polyglot, MATH-500, AIME 2026} reaches 4.55 points. See more details below 🧵1/7 This work is with Dimitris Papailiopoulos at AI Frontiers, a boutique research lab inside Microsoft Research.show more

Family is a fortress. Experience Avatar: The Way of... Water back on the big screen in 3D for a limited time. Get tickets now.show more

Microsoft presents Windows Agent Arena Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents... at Scale discuss: Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable potential to act as computer agents, enhancing human productivity and software accessibility in multi-modal tasks that require planning and reasoning. However, measuring agent performance in realistic environments remains a challenge since: (i) most benchmarks are limited to specific modalities or domains (e.g. text-only, web navigation, Q&A, coding) and (ii) full benchmark evaluations are slow (on order of magnitude of days) given the multi-step sequential nature of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Windows Agent Arena: a reproducible, general environment focusing exclusively on the Windows operating system (OS) where agents can operate freely within a real Windows OS and use the same wide range of applications, tools, and web browsers available to human users when solving tasks. We adapt the OSWorld framework (Xie et al., 2024) to create 150+ diverse Windows tasks across representative domains that require agent abilities in planning, screen understanding, and tool usage. Our benchmark is scalable and can be seamlessly parallelized in Azure for a full benchmark evaluation in as little as 20 minutes. To demonstrate Windows Agent Arena's capabilities, we also introduce a new multi-modal agent, Navi. Our agent achieves a success rate of 19.5% in the Windows domain, compared to 74.5% performance of an unassisted human. Navi also demonstrates strong performance on another popular web-based benchmark, Mind2Web. We offer extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of Navi's performance, and provide insights into the opportunities for future research in agent development and data generation using Windows Agent Arena.show more

What’s your favorite moment from #AvatarTheWayOfWater? Reply with a... GIF of yours for a chance to win copies of The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: The Way of Water — The Visual Dictionary, and The Ultimate Avatar Sticker Book, from DK Books US.show more

I'm excited to announce that a year after launching... and growing into the largest benchmark for Generative 3D, 3D Arena now has an official academic paper! 3D Arena: An Open Platform for Generative 3D Evaluationshow more

WebGL2 3D engine built from scratch I made it... to benchmark 3D on web without any libraries, achieving a smooth 120FPS and scoring 4 x 100 in Lighthouse. Code below Also, the whole JavaScript is only 10kb. Rain shader from . tutorial 3D models from pikuma.com courseshow more