arXiv: One Basis to Animate Them All: Gaussian Blendshape Distillation for Real-Time Avatars 3D Gaussian avatars support fast rendering, however, their real-time animation is often challenged by the costly neural inference. We address this bottleneck and show that the animation of pretrained avatar models can be closely approximated by a linear combination of identity-independent blendshapes. Building on this finding, we introduce GALA (Gaussian Animation via Linear Approximation), a distillation method that replaces per-frame heavy neural decoding with a shallow coefficient predictor a