# Controllable and Guided Face Synthesis for Unconstrained Face Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 74 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [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)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [DCFace: Synthetic Face Generation with Dual Condition Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07060/) (2023)
- [KeyPoint Relative Position Encoding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14852/) (2024)
- [FarSight: A Physics-Driven Whole-Body Biometric System at Large Distance and Altitude](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17206/) (2023)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15736/) (2023)
- [BiggerGait: Unlocking Gait Recognition with Layer-wise Representations from Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18132/) (2025)
- [50 Years of Automated Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24247/) (2025)
- [15M Multimodal Facial Image-Text Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08515/) (2024)
- [Open-Set Biometrics: Beyond Good Closed-Set Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16133/) (2024)
- [VariFace: Fair and Diverse Synthetic Dataset Generation for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06235/) (2024)
- [ARoFace: Alignment Robustness to Improve Low-Quality Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14972/) (2024)
- [ProS: Facial Omni-Representation Learning via Prototype-based Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01929/) (2023)
- [EyePreserve: Identity-Preserving Iris Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12028/) (2023)
- [Towards Flexible, Scalable, and Adaptive Multi-Modal Conditioned Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16274/) (2023)
- [CATFace: Cross-Attribute-Guided Transformer with Self-Attention Distillation for Low-Quality Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03037/) (2024)
- [GIF: Generative Inspiration for Face Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03012/) (2025)
- [QGFace: Quality-Guided Joint Training For Mixed-Quality Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17494/) (2023)
- [Boosting Unconstrained Face Recognition with Targeted Style Adversary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07642/) (2024)
- [DArFace: Deformation Aware Robustness for Low Quality Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08423/) (2025)
- [IDSelect: A RL-Based Cost-Aware Selection Agent for Video-based Multi-Modal Person Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18990/) (2026)
- [Domain Engineering for Applied Monocular Reconstruction of Parametric Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02600/) (2022)
- [DaliID: Distortion-Adaptive Learned Invariance for Identification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05753/) (2023)
- [Multi-Attribute guided Thermal Face Image Translation based on Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21032/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although significant advances have been made in face recognition (FR), FR in unconstrained environments remains challenging due to the domain gap between the semi-constrained training datasets and unconstrained testing scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a controllable face synthesis model (CFSM) that can mimic the distribution of target datasets in a style latent space. CFSM learns a linear subspace with orthogonal bases in the style latent space with precise control over the diversity and degree of synthesis. Furthermore, the pre-trained synthesis model can be guided by the FR model, making the resulting images more beneficial for FR model training. Besides, target dataset distributions are characterized by the learned orthogonal bases, which can be utilized to measure the distributional similarity among face datasets. Our approach yields significant performance gains on unconstrained benchmarks, such as IJB-B, IJB-C, TinyFace and IJB-S (+5.76% Rank1).