# Face.evoLVe: A High-Performance Face Recognition Library

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08621/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [POSTER: A Pyramid Cross-Fusion Transformer Network for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04083/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Bias Mitigation: Fairer Architectures Make for Fairer Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09943/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15736/) (2023)
- [Deep Convolutional Pooling Transformer for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05299/) (2022)
- [What Should Be Balanced in a "Balanced" Face Recognition Dataset?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09818/) (2023)
- [Be Careful What You Smooth For: Label Smoothing Can Be a Privacy Shield but Also a Catalyst for Model Inversion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06549/) (2023)
- [Learning to Discover Forgery Cues for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01030/) (2024)
- [MLFW: A Database for Face Recognition on Masked Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05804/) (2021)
- [How to Boost Face Recognition with StyleGAN?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10090/) (2022)
- [PP-HumanSeg: Connectivity-Aware Portrait Segmentation with a Large-Scale Teleconferencing Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07146/) (2021)
- [ARBEx: Attentive Feature Extraction with Reliability Balancing for Robust Facial Expression Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01486/) (2023)
- [Face Recognition In Children: A Longitudinal Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01760/) (2022)
- [AU-Aware Vision Transformers for Biased Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06609/) (2022)
- [Rank Matters: Understanding and Defending Model Inversion Attacks via Low-Rank Feature Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05814/) (2024)
- [Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification with Feasibility-Aware Intermediary Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09507/) (2024)
- [Longitudinal Evaluation of Child Face Recognition and the Impact of Underlying Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07225/) (2024)
- [Cross-Modal Distillation For Widely Differing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16296/) (2025)
- [LPN: Language-guided Prototypical Network for few-shot classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01515/) (2023)
- [A Comparison of Human and Machine Learning Errors in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11337/) (2025)
- [Generative Model Inversion Through the Lens of the Manifold Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20177/) (2025)
- [AU-Supervised Convolutional Vision Transformers for Synthetic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09777/) (2022)
- [1DFormer: a Transformer Architecture Learning 1D Landmark Representations for Facial Landmark Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00241/) (2023)
- [GReFEL: Geometry-Aware Reliable Facial Expression Learning under Bias and Imbalanced Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15927/) (2024)
- [PEEL the Layers and Find Yourself: Revisiting Inference-time Data Leakage for Residual Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06410/) (2025)
- [SoK: On the Survivability of Backdoor Attacks on Unconstrained Face Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01607/) (2025)
- [Low-rank Orthogonal Subspace Intervention for Generalizable Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we develop face.evoLVe -- a comprehensive library that collects and implements a wide range of popular deep learning-based methods for face recognition. First of all, face.evoLVe is composed of key components that cover the full process of face analytics, including face alignment, data processing, various backbones, losses, and alternatives with bags of tricks for improving performance. Later, face.evoLVe supports multi-GPU training on top of different deep learning platforms, such as PyTorch and PaddlePaddle, which facilitates researchers to work on both large-scale datasets with millions of images and low-shot counterparts with limited well-annotated data. More importantly, along with face.evoLVe, images before & after alignment in the common benchmark datasets are released with source codes and trained models provided. All these efforts lower the technical burdens in reproducing the existing methods for comparison, while users of our library could focus on developing advanced approaches more efficiently. Last but not least, face.evoLVe is well designed and vibrantly evolving, so that new face recognition approaches can be easily plugged into our framework. Note that we have used face.evoLVe to participate in a number of face recognition competitions and secured the first place. The version that supports PyTorch is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhaoJ9014/face.evoLVe.PyTorch and the PaddlePaddle version is available at https://github.com/ZhaoJ9014/face.evoLVe.PyTorch/tree/master/paddle. Face.evoLVe has been widely used for face analytics, receiving 2.4K stars and 622 forks.