Disclosed herein includes a system, a method, and a non-transitory computer readable medium for applying an expression to an avatar. In one aspect, a class of an expression of a face can be determined according to a set of attributes indicating states of portions of the face. In one aspect, a set of blendshapes with respective weights corresponding to the expression of the face can be determined according to the class of the expression of the face. In one aspect, the set of blendshapes with respective weights can be provided as an input to train a machine learning model. In one aspect, the machine learning model can be configured, via training, to generate an output set of blendshapes with respective weights, according to an input image. An image of an avatar may be rendered according to the output set of blendshapes with respective weights.