Giving Faces Their Feelings Back: Explicit Emotion Control for Feedforward Single-Image 3D Head Avatars

ArXi:2604.14541v1 Announce Type: new We present a framework for explicit emotion control in feed-forward, single-image 3D head avatar reconstruction. Unlike existing pipelines where emotion is implicitly entangled with geometry or appearance, we treat emotion as a first-class control signal that can be manipulated independently and consistently across identities. Our method injects emotion into existing feed-forward architectures via a dual-path modulation mechanism without modifying their core design.