AutoAvatar: Autoregressive Neural Fields for Dynamic Avatar Modeling

Abstract

Neural fields such as implicit surfaces have recently enabled avatar modeling from raw scans without explicit temporal correspondences. In this work, we exploit autoregressive modeling to further extend this notion to capture dynamic effects, such as soft-tissue deformations. Although autoregressive models are naturally capable of handling dynamics, it is non-trivial to apply them to implicit representations, as explicit state decoding is infeasible due to prohibitive memory requirements. In this work, for the first time, we enable autoregressive modeling of implicit avatars. To reduce the memory bottleneck and efficiently model dynamic implicit surfaces, we introduce the notion of articulated observer points, which relate implicit states to the explicit surface of a parametric human body model. We demonstrate that encoding implicit surfaces as a set of height fields defined on articulated observer points leads to significantly better generalization compared to a latent representation. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the state of the art, achieving plausible dynamic deformations even for unseen motions. https://zqbai-jeremy.github.io/autoavatar