URHead: A Unified UV-Space Representation for Joint Mesh–3DGS Optimization in Head Avatars

We present URHead, a unified representation for high-fidelityand animatable head avatars that fundamentally redefines mesh-Gaussianintegration. While mesh-based methods offer precise geometric controlbut lack photorealistic detail, and Gaussian-based approaches achievephotorealism but suffer from poor structural consistency, existing hybridsolutions fail to fully leverage their complementary strengths. Our keycontribution is a UV-space unification where both representations sharea common UV parameterization. Through joint optimization with adap-tive gaussian sampling, our method automatically learns to disentangleand allocate appropriate roles to each component. URHead maintainsfull parametric controllability while preserving subject-specific details,outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction qualityand animation consistency.Our code is available at https://github.com/Lseonghak/URHead