Face_Recognition
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IDPrior: Decoupling Identity Generation from Facial Image Synthesis
2026-11-05 12:41:49Fadi Boutros, Meri\c{c} Demir\"ors, Darian Toma\v{s}evi\'c, Vitomir \v{S}truc, Naser DamerAbstract
Large-scale identity-labeled face datasets are essential for training modern face recognition models, yet collecting and annotating such data is costly and raises privacy and ethical concerns. Existing synthetic face generation methods typically derive identities from predefined class labels, unconditional image generation, or predefined latent sampling strategies, without explicitly modeling the underlying distribution of facial identities. In this paper, we propose IDPrior, a two-stage framework that decouples identity generation from image synthesis. We first learn a diffusion prior in the embedding space of a pretrained face recognition model to model the distribution of facial identities and generate novel identity embeddings. These embeddings are then used to condition a pretrained identity-conditioned diffusion model (DM), enabling the synthesis of multiple images of the same identity. This modular design provides a scalable approach to identity generation while remaining compatible with existing and future identity-conditioned DMs. Experiments indicate that IDPrior generates diverse and well-separated identities while maintaining a closer correspondence to the distribution of authentic identities. Face recognition models trained on datasets generated using IDPrior-generated identities achieve competitive or improved performance compared with existing synthetic-data-based methods across multiple face verification benchmarks. Code and generated datasets are publicly available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07941
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A Bag of Tricks for Defending Deep Learning-based Face Recognition Pipelines against Backdoor Attacks
2026-11-04 12:12:32Quentin Le Roux, Marti Jimenez, Yannick Teglia, Philippe Loubet MoundiAbstract
The protection of mature, multi-stage Face Recognition Systems is crucial to system providers. This technical report targets the threat model most relevant to industry practitioners: although model training is performed in-house, training data is sourced from possibly-compromised third parties. Given this setting, we present three practical defense "tricks" against data poisoning-based backdoor attacks. The first operates at training-time, detecting poisoned identities during training or prior to a pipeline's deployment. The last two operate at inference-time, filtering suspicious inputs before an answer can be sent back to a potential attacker. Each method is presented with their motivation, algorithms and computational impact, and evaluated on realistic face recognition workloads. Our goal is to provide actionable hardening techniques to system providers.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06412
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Hard Sample-Conditioned Decorrelated Attention for Robust Face Recognition
2026-10-30 14:21:43Tahar Chettaoui, Guray Ozgur, Eduarda Caldeira, Naser Damer, Fadi BoutrosAbstract
Multi-head attention in Vision Transformers (ViTs) allows independent attention patterns across heads, but without explicit regularization, heads may learn redundant patterns rather than complementary roles. Correlation-based penalties encourage head disentanglement, yet apply uniform regularization across all training samples. In face recognition (FR), hard samples whose embeddings lie close to competing identities are critical for optimization and generalization. Motivated by this, we propose ViT-HarDis, which conditions attention head disentanglement on sample difficulty: samples with high cosine similarity to negative class centers receive stronger head decorrelation, enforcing specialization where identity ambiguity is highest. Experiments show improvements over both the baseline and uniform disentanglement on most benchmarks. Our analysis shows that ViT-HarDis reduces the similarity of hard samples to competing class centers while decreasing inter-head attention similarity, and that applying disentanglement only to the final transformer layers outperforms regularizing the entire network. Trained on WebFace4M, ViT-HarDis achieves SOTA results among ViT-based methods on IJB-B, IJB-C, and TinyFace Rank-1, while achieving the best IJB-B and TinyFace results when trained on MS1MV3, improving FR without architectural modifications or additional inference cost. Code: this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41789
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CVBL-CCTV-Face Dataset for Real-World Face Enhancement and Recognition in Surveillance
2026-10-27 07:48:18Manish Das, Ajay Kumar Yadav, Shiv Ram Dubey, Satish Kumar SinghAbstract
In real-world surveillance settings, facial captures from closed-circuit television systems suffer from degradations such as low resolution, motion blur, noise, and occlusions, which undermine dependable face recognition. In this study, we propose a framework for super-resolution and identity recognition, aimed at surveillance applications. For this purpose, we present the CVBL-CCTV-Face Dataset which is a dataset of real-world images taken in an unpaired manner where each pair consists of a low-quality (LQ) image of a face captured by a 8MP IP Dome CCTV camera together with a high-quality (HQ) reference image that is taken in controlled settings. In order to cope with the various problems posed by such datasets, we construct a modular system that involves face detection, deep learning-based super-resolution of low-quality face images, and identity recognition through L2-normalized embeddings extracted by an embedding model. Enhancement models are trained and tested according to three different setups, and the system is deployed for identity verification in a real-time unconstrained environment.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36781
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Unveil the Mask: Jointly-Optimized Diffusion Masked Pretraining for Appearance-Agnostic Operator Verification
2026-10-26 13:25:28Katsuya Ogata, Ryoya Yoshiyama, Kawachi Hodaka, Yuta NakashimaAbstract
Photorealistic avatar videos decouple the appearance of a rendered face from the person who operates it, which makes conventional face recognition unsuitable for identifying the operator. Verifying the operator therefore requires representations of how a face moves that are insensitive to what the avatar looks like. We propose a verification framework built without any external pretrained model. It uses two complementary modalities provided for each sample: facial landmark sequences and video frames. From the landmark modality, it learns motion representations by diffusion masked pretraining over grouped landmarks, guided by lightweight auxiliary tasks that predict behavioral cues such as motion intensity and eye openness, and turns them into operator embeddings with a contrastive linear probe. To generalize to unseen avatar generators, the pretraining input is randomly transformed to simulate how a generator may alter the operator's motion. From the video modality, it captures fine facial motion through differences between consecutive frames. The embeddings of the two modalities are combined into one. Our approach reaches an overall AUC of 0.769 on the WBA2026 benchmark. Linear probing shows that the video embedding retains little information about the avatar's identity, whereas the landmark embedding retains some, and fusing the two modalities improves verification in particular across speaking and listening modes.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35414
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Floor Friction Assessment from Robot Tire-Surface Interaction
2026-10-24 15:24:25Kulbhushan Komarraju, Nathaniel Pearson, Yu Gu, Jason GrossAbstract
Floor traction influences wheel-slip behavior, dead-reckoning accuracy, and the navigation performance of wheeled mobile robots that rely on wheel odometry. As these robots become increasingly common in GNSS-denied indoor environments, including automated manufacturing and retail facilities, their onboard measurements could also be used to characterize floor conditions and improve localization. In this study, a skid-steer robot was driven over five floor surfaces with distinct traction characteristics using commanded velocity profiles designed to induce wheel slip through repeated acceleration and direction reversal. Differences between the body velocity estimated from inertial sensing and the velocity obtained from wheel odometry were evaluated using the integrated relative-velocity error, phase-derived wheel-to-body response delay, and velocity-reversal response delay. Welch power spectral density analysis was additionally applied to characterize the frequency distribution of the velocity mismatch during positive and negative acceleration. Band-integrated spectral power, spectral centroid, and spectral decay rate were extracted from each recording and evaluated using linear discriminant analysis and multiclass classification. The response-delay measurements produced consistent surface-dependent trends, with the longest delays observed on soap and the shortest delays observed on carpet. The spectral features also provided clear separation among the tested surfaces, achieving a balanced classification accuracy of 97.1% under recording-level cross-validation. These results demonstrate that both the magnitude and frequency domain characteristics of wheel-to-body velocity mismatch contain useful information about tire-surface interactions. Such information could support surface recognition and the development of slip-aware wheel-odometry weighting within robot state-estimation frameworks.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33735
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Different Defects, Different Effects: A Controlled Audit of Face Recognition Training Data
2026-10-20 18:04:27Ana Dias, Jo\~ao Ribeiro Pinto, Hugo Proen\c{c}a, Jo\~ao C. NevesAbstract
The development of face recognition has been strongly supported by the availability of large-scale training datasets. Among them, MS-Celeb-1M has played an important role by providing millions of facial images from nearly 100K identities. However, the size and heterogeneity of such datasets increase the likelihood of annotation errors, redundant samples, and other forms of data inconsistency. This motivated the introduction of refined versions, such as MS1MV2 and MS1MV3, aimed at improving the quality of the training data. Despite these cleaning efforts, we show that several types of training-data defects remain in MS1MV3. By proposing complementary data-auditing strategies, we identify five defect categories: exact and near-duplicate images, split identities, crop errors, multiple-face ambiguity, and invalid content. We then assess the effect of correcting these defects under a controlled face-recognition training protocol based on IResNet-50 and ArcFace. The results show that targeted interventions can preserve, and in some cases improve, recognition performance while requiring fewer optimization steps to reach the performance of the original training set. Duplicate removal provides the clearest overall benefit, while split-identity merging and invalid-content removal also improve training efficiency. Overall, the results indicate that the effect of dataset cleaning depends strongly on the type of defect being addressed and provide further evidence that training-data quality remains an important and comparatively underexplored factor in large-scale face recognition. The training manifests and code used in this work will be released upon acceptance.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28766
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GMoE-FTI: A Universal Facial Template Inversion Method Adopting Genuine Mixture-of-Experts Mechanism
2026-10-19 07:31:52Zixuan Shen, Zhihua Xia, Kaikai Gan, Peipeng YuAbstract
Face recognition systems have been ubiquitously deployed across daily scenarios. To protect user privacy, mainstream systems store facial templates rather than raw face images for identity verification. However, facial template inversion (FTI) technologies can reconstruct faces from templates, which endangers biometric privacy. Existing FTI methods only fit single type of templates, failing to reconstruct identity-consistent faces from unseen types. To tackle this limitation, we survey mainstream template extractors which can be classified into five categories according the template distribution: unit-sphere, angle-linear, strict unit-sphere, cone-shaped, anuniform hypersphere. Inspired by this observation, this paper proposes GMoE-FTI, a universal FTI framework powered by a genuine MoE mechanism that differs from load-balanced multi-branch alternatives. It follows a three-stage training strategy: (1) independently train five mapping experts (MEs) and a matching module (MM); (2) conduct collaborative inference by weighting each ME's output with MM's output, so as to generate unified latent codes compatible with pre-trained StyleGAN3; (3) perform end-to-end joint fine-tuning over all modules to identity consistency and boost cross-expert coordination. Extensive evaluations on the LFW benchmark validate the superiority of GMoE-FTI against SOTA methods. Evaluated on seven prevailing unseen template types including AdaFace, CosFace, CurricularFace, ElasticFace, SphereFace2, SphereFace-R, and TransFace, GMoE-FTI achieves an average 40% TAR improvement, with average FAPD and FAPC each reduced by 2%, verifying its universal generalization across heterogeneous templates.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33055
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Detection of false positives by human reviewers depends on the face recognition algorithm and its security configuration
2026-10-16 18:19:10Esha Edakoth, John J. Howard, Isabelle M. Shuggi, Yevgeniy B. Sirotin, Robert WoodAbstract
Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technology into identity workflows, such as automated face recognition (FR), has enhanced operational capabilities, with FR algorithms achieving super-human scale and accuracy. However, these gains can make human oversight of FR more difficult, raising questions about the effectiveness of these human-AI teams. We measured human reviewers' ability to detect false positive errors made by commercial FR algorithms across varying security configurations. Using a novel dataset, the Difficult Facial Image Comparison Test (DFICT), derived from false positives made by four comparable commercial face recognition algorithms, we measured the ability of 801human reviewers to detect algorithmic false positives across three security configurations, representing operationally relevant biometric thresholds. Our findings show that human reviewers can reduce algorithmic false positives, but performance declines at stricter security thresholds. Further, reviewer performance varied by algorithm indicating that some algorithms are more compatible with human oversight. We suggest that biometric systems should be designed to account for human reviewers' variable effectiveness, particularly in high-security applications. Our findings should be considered during algorithm selection and inform human oversight strategies to minimize AI-related risks in operational FR deployments.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33045
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Adaptive Adversarial Augmentation for Controllable Face Synthesis
2026-10-08 06:48:13Saransh Suri, Shivang Agarwal, Mayank Vatsa, Richa SinghAbstract
Synthetic data provides a scalable alternative to real-world datasets for training face recognition models, particularly under challenging conditions such as low resolution, occlusion, and masks. Yet, most approaches lack diversity and fail to generalize effectively. We propose Ensemble Feedback Controllable Synthesis (EFCS), a guided framework that generates diverse and challenging samples while preserving visual realism. EFCS expands distributional variability, often reflected in higher FID and KID scores compared to single-feedback and random synthesis, while maintaining high precision. Recognition models trained on EFCS data consistently outperform baselines across multiple benchmarks, showing improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce an analytically motivated formulation linking perturbation-induced difficulty, sample utility, and performance degradation, offering principled insights into balancing synthetic data complexity for optimal training. Together, these contributions establish EFCS as an effective and analytically grounded approach for bridging the gap between synthetic and real datasets.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11356
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MagCilia: A Compact Magnetociliary Tactile Sensor with 3D Force Sensing for Robotic Contact Perception and Grasping Feedback
2026-10-07 06:38:39Yu Feng, Hao Wu, Haotian Guo, Haoming Liu, William Su, Jingxiang Guo, Jiankun Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wen Jung Li, Jianshu ZhouAbstract
Robotic grasping and surface exploration benefit from simultaneous measurement of normal and tangential forces and from surface information obtained through contact. Here, we present a compact magnetociliary tactile sensor (MagCilia) that combines a flexible magnetic-cilia structure with a Hall sensor for 3D force sensing. Quasi-static finite element analysis is used to investigate structural deformation and magnetic responses under multidirectional loading. To reconstruct forces from the coupled magnetic channels, we propose causal history fusion regression (CHFR), which combines current magnetic-field measurements with their recent changes. Five-fold cross-validation grouped by calibration record yields root-mean-square errors of 0.40, 0.57, and 0.69 N for Fx, Fy, and Fz, respectively, with corresponding coefficients of determination of 0.93, 0.90, and 0.92. Robotic experiments demonstrate tangential-force-guided gripper adjustment and multi-axis load monitoring under external perturbations. Frequency-domain features of the reconstructed forces distinguish six surface categories with 99.39% accuracy in three-fold cross-validation grouped by acquisition session. An online robotic demonstration additionally identifies all six tested surfaces. These results demonstrate 3D force reconstruction, grasping feedback, and surface recognition using a single compact tactile unit.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09536
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Damnatio Memoriae: Adversarially and Selectively Forgetting Identities in the Embedding Space of Face Recognition Models
2026-09-22 22:10:50\"Unsal \"Ozt\"urk, Vedrana Krivoku\'ca Hahn, Sushil Bhattacharjee, S\'ebastien MarcelAbstract
A face recognition model links two images of a person recorded on separate occasions when their embedding similarity exceeds an operating threshold. We consider making chosen identities unlinkable across separate occasions while the model remains in service for the rest of the population. Deleting their images and retraining does not achieve this, since the model recognises identities never observed in training. Therefore, the embedding space must be altered against these identities, the process of which we call open-set adversarial forgetting. We propose three loss functions, one that disperses an identity's embeddings from their centroid, and two that map each image onto its own near-orthogonal target, learnt with the classifier head or fixed in advance as an almost-orthonormal frame. Each is fine-tuned alongside the classification objective on a subset of each identity's images. We evaluate them against four methods from prior work in verification and identification, at two forget scales and three backbones. Every loss acting on the embedding geometry makes the forget identities nearly unidentifiable. The orthonormal frame alone achieves strong forgetting, which holds wherever an image of that subset enters the comparison and leaves distinct forget identities unlinkable. It also surpasses a concurrent unsupervised method at a higher retain rate.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27115
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Adversarial Attacks and Identity Leakage in De-Identification Systems: An Empirical Study
2026-09-22 20:07:20Felix Rosberg, Cristofer Englund, Eren Erdal Aksoy, Fernando Alonso-FernandezAbstract
In this paper, we investigate the impact of adversarial attacks on identity encoders within a realistic de-identification framework. Our experiments show that the transferability of attacks transfers from an external surrogate model to the system model (e.g., CosFace to ArcFace) allows the adversary to cause identity information to leak in a sufficiently sensitive face recognition system. We present experimental evidence and propose strategies to mitigate this vulnerability. Specifically, we show how fine-tuning on adversarial examples helps to mitigate this effect for distortion-based attacks (i.e., snow, fog, etc.), while a simple low-pass filter can attenuate the effect of adversarial noise without affecting the de-identified images. Our mitigation results in a de-identification system that preserves its functionality while being significantly more robust to adversarial noise.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27022
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StyleAT: Defending Face Recognition Against Semantic Attacks
2026-09-20 12:28:23Ben Shapira, Roi Cohen, Shang-Tse Chen, Mahmood SharifAbstract
With face-recognition models now embedded in everyday authentication and surveillance, recent works have pinpointed a critical weakness: these models remain acutely vulnerable to adversarial semantic edits. I.e., adversarially produced semantic alterations to the input, such as slight aging or pose changes, can induce misclassifications. Certain existing attacks are powerful, but they can be computationally costly, rendering them inadequate for developing defenses (e.g., through adversarial training). To fill the gap, we introduce BoundStyle, a potent semantic attack operating in StyleGAN's rich latent space to maximize misclassification rates. Notably, BoundStyle achieves high attack success rates while being ${\sim}{\times}9.5$ faster than existing state-of-the-art attacks, making it suitable for adversarial training. Building on BoundStyle, we develop StyleAT, an efficient adversarial training scheme that incorporates low-budget attack variants yet defends against stronger and unseen semantic attacks. We evaluate on two datasets unseen during training and seven models, and find that StyleAT boosts robust accuracy against state-of-the-art attacks and outperforms common defenses in various settings.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23596
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Towards Robust Classroom Attendance: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Face Detection and Recognition Models
2026-09-19 04:14:58Himani Trivedi, Hiren Patel, Ridham Patel, Krutika Patel, Nancy PatelAbstract
Manual attendance methods, such as paper or register-based systems, take a lot of time, can lead to errors, and are easy to falsify. Face recognition is more reliable, but it frequently struggles in classrooms because lighting and other conditions can vary. Face recognition datasets are designed for regulated environments and do not capture the actual challenges found in classrooms. To address this, a new face detection and recognition dataset, the Visage Face dataset, comprising 16,234 face samples, is proposed for the task of face detection and recognition. The photos are taken from different angles and under varying lighting conditions, with students showing a range of expressions, and some faces partly covered to reflect real-life situations. A YOLO-based system is used to detect faces and tested seven advanced face recognition models with thirteen configurations: LVFace, QCFace, FaceLiVTv2, TopoFR, EdgeFace, TransFace, and GhostFaceNets. Of these, FaceLiVTv2-M performed best, with 99.75% Top-1/Top-5 accuracy and an inference time of 6.459 ms. These results show that the Visage Face Dataset is a realistic and challenging benchmark for face recognition in classroom attendance.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22750
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Benchmarking the Explanatory Quality of Open-Weight Vision-Language Models in Face Recognition
2026-09-18 15:06:02Laurent Colbois, S\'ebastien MarcelAbstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently been proposed as promising tools for face recognition, as they can produce natural language explanations alongside similarity scores. This capability is considered appealing for face comparisons in forensic contexts, which require decisions to be transparent and auditable. However, existing evaluations of VLMs for that use case focus mostly on recognition accuracy, while the validity of generated explanations remains unquantified. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking framework for VLM-based face recognition that treats explanation quality as a core evaluation axis. We propose two criteria that explanations should satisfy: relevance, i.e., reliance on identity-stable facial features; and faithfulness, i.e., alignment with the visible image content without hallucinated features. We jointly develop a methodology enabling the quantification of relevance and faithfulness of evaluated models, based on constraining model outputs to a structured explanation format that supports automated querying and auditing. Using this framework, we benchmark several families of open-weight VLMs, jointly evaluating face verification accuracy and explanation quality. Our results highlight remaining shortcomings of produced explanations, and emphasize the need for such explanation quality metrics to get a complete picture of model performance. The proposed benchmark and open-source evaluation harness provide a foundation for proper benchmarking and future fine-tuning of explainable face recognition systems.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21879
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DenseFace: Bias Mitigation in Face Recognition via Density-Aware Probabilistic Matching
2026-09-14 18:00:44Mansur Bultygov, Vadim Seliutin, Dmitry Nekhaev, Ivan LaptevAbstract
Despite steady progress in face recognition, current face recognition models still suffer from significant demographic biases. While approaches for bias mitigation have been proposed, existing methods often impose constraints on the training procedure and result in the degradation of recognition accuracy. To address this issue, we here introduce a method that reduces racial bias in pre-trained face recognition models without compromising their accuracy. To this end, we model face embeddings of each person by von Mises-Fisher (MF) distribution. We next observe the dependency between demographic attributes and the density of MF distributions, and propose DenseFace, a probabilistic face matching procedure that accounts for differences in MF distributions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate DenseFace to consistently reduce racial bias in strong face recognition models varying in network architectures, training datasets and loss functions. Notably, DenseFace preserves recognition accuracy and requires no retraining of the underlying face recognition model. Our work also investigates previously adopted bias measures and makes suggestions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16149
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Online Video Agent Harness for Long Video Understanding
2026-09-11 13:13:03Sen Yang, Boqiang Duan, Jing Yang, Weihao Bo, Jie Liu, Boyuan Tong, Ze Feng, Wenkang Zhang, Jingdong Wang, Hua WuAbstract
Long video understanding often behaves like a visual needle-in-a-haystack problem: query-relevant evidence is sparsely distributed across long temporal spans, while packing dense frames into a single VLM context incurs \textit{context rot} and high cost. Existing video agents often rely on query-agnostic offline preprocessing or ad hoc tool sets, which can miss query-specific details and waste computation. In this work, we present VideoXAgent, a purely online video-agent harness for long video understanding that starts from the given video file and user query, plans and decomposes the task, invokes specialized expert tools on demand, and aggregates multimodal evidence to produce a final answer while resolving conflicts among observations. To support this on-demand invocation, we design a suite of heterogeneous expert tools guided by a data-driven taxonomy of atomic capabilities, spanning scripts, VLMs, and domain models (e.g., detection, OCR, ASR, face recognition). The harness further enforces objective evidence prompting and budget-aware control to curb hallucination and non-termination. Across Video-MME-Long, LongVideoBench-Long, LVBench, and MINERVA, VideoXAgent is competitive with frontier LMMs and video agents under a smaller context footprint---about 50k tokens of agent context per sample, even on hour-long videos. In particular, on complex video-reasoning benchmarks such as MINERVA, it matches this level while using only about 15\% of the context of a 1,024-frame dense-packing baseline. Notably, the harness remains effective with a visually weak or even text-only orchestrator, suggesting that strong long-video understanding can emerge from progressive agentic evidence seeking rather than from packing the full video into a single context. Project page: this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12818
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SynThermFace: Amplifying Limited Paired Data for Visible-Thermal Face Recognition via Synthetic Data Generation
2026-09-09 15:15:04Anjith George, Adam Unal, Sebastien MarcelAbstract
Face recognition (FR) is a widely used modality for biometric authentication, but conventional models rely on visible-spectrum imagery and degrade when high-quality RGB images cannot be captured. Cross-spectral face recognition addresses this limitation by matching visible images with other modalities such as thermal imagery, enabling more reliable performance in low-light, nighttime, and unconstrained conditions. However, progress is limited by the scarcity of paired visible-thermal data, which is difficult and costly to collect at scale. We propose SynThermFace, a framework that amplifies limited real visible-thermal supervision into larger paired adaptation datasets for cross-spectral face recognition. A diffusion model is first adapted using a limited set of paired visible--thermal images and then used to generate large-scale paired visible--synthetic thermal data from existing real or synthetic visible face datasets. The generated pairs are used to adapt a pretrained visible-spectrum face recognition model into a CFR model. Unlike synthesis-based approaches that require image translation at test time, the proposed method shifts generation to the training stage and performs inference with a single forward pass through the adapted recognition model. Under the same MCXFace real-pair protocol, PACT improves over the evaluated CFR adaptation baselines, isolating the effect of the proposed adaptation objective. Training PACT on larger generated paired datasets provides additional improvements over both the unadapted model and the real-pair PACT configuration. Cross-database evaluation on the Tufts dataset provides evidence that the learned representation transfers to an unseen database. The source code and trained models will be made publicly available.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10303
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Learning to Attract and Repel: Dual Quality Margin Learning for Face Recognition
2026-09-02 14:19:43El Ouanas Belabbaci, Bhavesh Wani, Philipp Terh\"orstAbstract
Face recognition in unconstrained environments remains highly challenging due to diverse and extreme variations encountered in real-world scenarios. To mitigate these effects, existing margin-based approaches model sample quality through feature magnitude. However, magnitude-based modeling alone is susceptible to identity-agnostic noise, which can degrade the reliability and discriminative power of learned representations. In this paper, we propose Dual Quality Margin Learning for Face Recognition (DQM-Face), a novel framework that enables refined attraction and repulsion dynamics during representation learning. Our approach unifies conventional magnitude-based quality estimation with a newly introduced semantic quality learning mechanism, realized via squeeze-and-excitation semantic attention. By jointly leveraging magnitude and semantic cues, we construct enhanced quality-aware margins that adaptively strengthen intra-class compactness through improved attraction during learning. To further enhance inter-class discrimination, we introduce a repulsion margin formulation that explicitly enlarges inter-class separation. The unified integration of semantic quality modeling with dual attraction-repulsion margin optimization results in a more structured and discriminative feature geometry. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging benchmarks demonstrate that DQM-Face consistently outperforms state-of-the-art face recognition methods. Moreover, we show that the quality learned for margin optimization is highly effective for face image quality assessment within the proposed framework, demonstrating that the learned quality signal is intrinsically aligned with the recognition objective. The code is publicly available: this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02644
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