Apple AI Updates: October 27, 2026

1. GHARP Animates 3D Gaussian Heads in Real Time From a Few Photos

Apple. Apple researchers published GHARP, an ACCV paper on animating 3D human heads in real time from a few input images and a driving expression signal. The method splits the work into an offline identity stage that builds a compact, fixed-size Gaussian representation using a pretrained reconstruction model, and a lightweight runtime stage designed for mobile devices that predicts expression-dependent residuals. A body alignment network handles body pose and clothing, which expression codes do not describe and which otherwise cause blur and flicker. Apple reports state-of-the-art quality on the Ava-256 benchmark while running up to 13x faster on an A100 GPU with 8x fewer Gaussians. Source