Identity-Consistent Expression Fields: A Disentangled Neural Radiance Field Framework for Few-Shot Facial Expression Synthesis

Abstract

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have enabled photorealistic novel-view synthesis of 3D scenes and, in the facial domain, have been extended to reconstruct and animate 3D face models from a small number of images. However, existing few-shot dynamic NeRF methods for facial expression editing typically warp a single learned feature volume conditioned on target expression parameters, which can cause identity-specific appearance details (skin texture, fine geometric structure) to drift when the model is driven toward expressions far from those seen in the few-shot input set. We propose Identity-Consistent Expression Fields (ICEF), a framework that explicitly disentangles a static, identity-specific radiance component from a dynamic, expression-conditioned deformation component, and introduces an identity preservation regularizer that constrains the deformation network to modify only expression-relevant regions while leaving identity-specific canonical appearance untouched. ICEF further incorporates a confidence-weighted conditional feature warping step that down-weights unreliable warps for target expressions that are far, in parameter space, from the observed few-shot inputs, mitigating artifacts observed in prior few-shot dynamic NeRF methods when extrapolating to novel expressions. We relate ICEF to prior few-shot dynamic NeRF, static 3D-aware face generation, and disentangled face-editing radiance field methods, and describe an evaluation protocol measuring both novel-expression rendering quality and, specifically, identity-consistency metrics across a range of expression-parameter extrapolation distances.