# Few-Shot Head Swapping in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13100 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13100/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [Deferred Neural Rendering: Image Synthesis using Neural Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12356/) (2019)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07860/) (2018)
- [Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08861/) (2018)
- [X2Face: A network for controlling face generation by using images, audio, and pose codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10550/) (2018)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [Fast Bi-layer Neural Synthesis of One-Shot Realistic Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10174/) (2020)
- [Cross-domain Correspondence Learning for Exemplar-based Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05571/) (2020)
- [Neural Head Reenactment with Latent Pose Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12000/) (2020)
- [One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04932/) (2021)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Video Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09909/) (2019)
- [Towards Open-Set Identity Preserving Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11182/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17881/) (2024)
- [StyleSwap: Style-Based Generator Empowers Robust Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13514/) (2022)
- [Realistic and Efficient Face Swapping: A Unified Approach with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07269/) (2024)
- [CharacterFactory: Sampling Consistent Characters with GANs for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15677/) (2024)
- [A Generalist FaceX via Learning Unified Facial Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00551/) (2023)
- [HS-Diffusion: Semantic-Mixing Diffusion for Head Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06458/) (2022)
- [HiFiVFS: High Fidelity Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18293/) (2024)
- [E4S: Fine-grained Face Swapping via Editing With Regional GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15081/) (2023)
- [Diff-ID: An Explainable Identity Difference Quantification Framework for DeepFake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18174/) (2023)
- [GHOST 2.0: generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18417/) (2025)
- [Controllable and Expressive One-Shot Video Head Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16852/) (2025)
- [Stable-Hair v2: Real-World Hair Transfer via Multiple-View Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07591/) (2025)
- [Controllable One-Shot Face Video Synthesis With Semantic Aware Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14471/) (2023)
- [Towards High-fidelity Head Blending with Chroma Keying for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00652/) (2024)
- [Towards High Fidelity Face Swapping: A Comprehensive Survey and New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00883/) (2026)
- [In Anticipation of Perfect Deepfake: Identity-anchored Artifact-agnostic Detection under Rebalanced Deepfake Detection Protocol](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00483/) (2024)
- [DirectSwap: Paired, Mask-Free Video Head Swapping with Full-Reference Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09417/) (2025)
- [UniBioTransfer: A Unified Framework for Multiple Biometrics Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19637/) (2026)
- [GSwap: Realistic Head Swapping with Dynamic Neural Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23168/) (2026)
- [AHS: Adaptive Head Synthesis via Synthetic Data Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15857/) (2026)
- [HairPort: In-context 3D-aware Hair Import and Transfer for Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12562/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The head swapping task aims at flawlessly placing a source head onto a target body, which is of great importance to various entertainment scenarios. While face swapping has drawn much attention, the task of head swapping has rarely been explored, particularly under the few-shot setting. It is inherently challenging due to its unique needs in head modeling and background blending. In this paper, we present the Head Swapper (HeSer), which achieves few-shot head swapping in the wild through two delicately designed modules. Firstly, a Head2Head Aligner is devised to holistically migrate pose and expression information from the target to the source head by examining multi-scale information. Secondly, to tackle the challenges of skin color variations and head-background mismatches in the swapping procedure, a Head2Scene Blender is introduced to simultaneously modify facial skin color and fill mismatched gaps in the background around the head. Particularly, seamless blending is achieved with the help of a Semantic-Guided Color Reference Creation procedure and a Blending UNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method produces superior head swapping results in a variety of scenes.