ZARA: Zero-shot Animatable and Relightable 3D Avatar reconstruction from a single image

arXiv:2611.10562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent large human reconstruction models create remarkable animatable 3D avatars from a single image, but their appearance remains entangled with the illumination and cannot be relighted. In contrast, existing 3D relightable-avatar reconstruction methods typically require person-specific optimization. We present ZARA, a zero-shot feed-forward framework that reconstructs an animatable 3D Gaussian avatar together with its intrinsic attributes from a single image. ZARA couples a pretrained large-scale human reconstruction model with a Material Transformer to inherit geometry priors while learning material-aware Gaussian representations. To preserve localized details, we introduce Gaussian-aligned material feature fusion strategy, which injects multi-scale material features onto individual Gaussians and combines them with geometry tokens. As most human-avatar datasets lack ground-truth material maps, we use pseudo-material labels as conditioning inputs and supervision targets during training. We further introduce MatFace regularization to preserve facial structure and color in albedo prediction under unreliable facial pseudo-material supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZARA reconstructs animatable and relightable humans within tens of seconds without person-specific optimization or post-processing, outperforming existing baselines in both relighting quality and materials generalization ability. As the ability of recovering the physically-based-rendering attributes of the human, ZARA also enables direct material editing of the avatar's appearance.