# Stitch it in Time: GAN-Based Facial Editing of Real Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08361 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08361/

## Key facts

- Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [GAN Inversion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05278/) (2021)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03552/) (2016)
- [StyleGAN-V: A Continuous Video Generator with the Price, Image Quality and Perks of StyleGAN2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14683/) (2021)
- [BiSeNet V2: Bilateral Network with Guided Aggregation for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02147/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in the GAN Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03754/) (2020)
- [StyleRig: Rigging StyleGAN for 3D Control over Portrait Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00121/) (2020)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (2021)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)
- [HyperStyle: StyleGAN Inversion with HyperNetworks for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15666/) (2021)
- [GANalyze: Toward Visual Definitions of Cognitive Image Properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10112/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04036/) (2022)
- ["This is my unicorn, Fluffy": Personalizing frozen vision-language representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01694/) (2022)
- [MetaPortrait: Identity-Preserving Talking Head Generation with Fast Personalized Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08062/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Face Swapping via Regional GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14068/) (2022)
- [Third Time's the Charm? Image and Video Editing with StyleGAN3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13433/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Video Autoencoders: Toward Temporally Consistent Face Video Editing via Disentangled Video Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02802/) (2022)
- [3DAvatarGAN: Bridging Domains for Personalized Editable Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02700/) (2023)
- [State-of-the-Art in the Architecture, Methods and Applications of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.14020/) (2022)
- [Towards Consistent Video Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17431/) (2023)
- [Temporally Consistent Semantic Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10590/) (2022)
- [TextToon: Real-Time Text Toonify Head Avatar from Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07160/) (2024)
- [VToonify: Controllable High-Resolution Portrait Video Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11224/) (2022)
- [StyleGANEX: StyleGAN-Based Manipulation Beyond Cropped Aligned Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06146/) (2023)
- [VIVE3D: Viewpoint-Independent Video Editing using 3D-Aware GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15893/) (2023)
- [SketchVideo: Sketch-based Video Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23284/) (2025)
- [DynaGAN: Dynamic Few-shot Adaptation of GANs to Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14554/) (2022)
- [DiffusionAct: Controllable Diffusion Autoencoder for One-shot Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17217/) (2024)
- [RIGID: Recurrent GAN Inversion and Editing of Real Face Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06097/) (2023)
- [StyleLipSync: Style-based Personalized Lip-sync Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00521/) (2023)
- [Portrait Video Editing Empowered by Multimodal Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13591/) (2024)
- [MaskINT: Video Editing via Interpolative Non-autoregressive Masked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12468/) (2023)
- [FashionTex: Controllable Virtual Try-on with Text and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04451/) (2023)
- [Video2StyleGAN: Disentangling Local and Global Variations in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13996/) (2022)
- [E4S: Fine-grained Face Swapping via Editing With Regional GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15081/) (2023)
- [INR-V: A Continuous Representation Space for Video-based Generative Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16579/) (2022)
- [PEGASUS: Personalized Generative 3D Avatars with Composable Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10636/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Decoupled Representation Learning and Regularization for Speech-Preserving Facial Expression Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05672/) (2025)
- [Self-Conditioned Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04040/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability of Generative Adversarial Networks to encode rich semantics within their latent space has been widely adopted for facial image editing. However, replicating their success with videos has proven challenging. Sets of high-quality facial videos are lacking, and working with videos introduces a fundamental barrier to overcome - temporal coherency. We propose that this barrier is largely artificial. The source video is already temporally coherent, and deviations from this state arise in part due to careless treatment of individual components in the editing pipeline. We leverage the natural alignment of StyleGAN and the tendency of neural networks to learn low frequency functions, and demonstrate that they provide a strongly consistent prior. We draw on these insights and propose a framework for semantic editing of faces in videos, demonstrating significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art. Our method produces meaningful face manipulations, maintains a higher degree of temporal consistency, and can be applied to challenging, high quality, talking head videos which current methods struggle with.