# Towards Robust Face Recognition with Comprehensive Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.13600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13600/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Additive Margin Softmax for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05599/) (2018)
- [Cross-Age LFW: A Database for Studying Cross-Age Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08197/) (2017)
- [WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04098/) (2021)
- [The MegaFace Benchmark: 1 Million Faces for Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00596/) (2015)
- [MobileFaceNets: Efficient CNNs for Accurate Real-Time Face Verification on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07573/) (2018)
- [RetinaFace: Single-stage Dense Face Localisation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00641/) (2019)
- [Partial FC: Training 10 Million Identities on a Single Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05222/) (2020)
- [A Light CNN for Deep Face Representation with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02683/) (2015)
- [AdaCos: Adaptively Scaling Cosine Logits for Effectively Learning Deep Face Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00292/) (2019)
- [The Devil of Face Recognition is in the Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11649/) (2018)
- [Deeply learned face representations are sparse, selective, and robust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1265/) (2014)
- [PolyNet: A Pursuit of Structural Diversity in Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05725/) (2016)
- [AM-LFS: AutoML for Loss Function Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07375/) (2019)
- [Loss Function Search for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06542/) (2020)
- [Noise-Tolerant Paradigm for Training Face Recognition CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10357/) (2019)
- [Towards Flops-constrained Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00632/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Towards Universal Image Embeddings: A Large-Scale Dataset and Challenge for Generic Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01858/) (2023)
- [Decoupled DETR: Spatially Disentangling Localization and Classification for Improved End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15955/) (2023)
- [Towards Large-scale Masked Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16364/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data cleaning, architecture, and loss function design are important factors contributing to high-performance face recognition. Previously, the research community tries to improve the performance of each single aspect but failed to present a unified solution on the joint search of the optimal designs for all three aspects. In this paper, we for the first time identify that these aspects are tightly coupled to each other. Optimizing the design of each aspect actually greatly limits the performance and biases the algorithmic design. Specifically, we find that the optimal model architecture or loss function is closely coupled with the data cleaning. To eliminate the bias of single-aspect research and provide an overall understanding of the face recognition model design, we first carefully design the search space for each aspect, then a comprehensive search method is introduced to jointly search optimal data cleaning, architecture, and loss function design. In our framework, we make the proposed comprehensive search as flexible as possible, by using an innovative reinforcement learning based approach. Extensive experiments on million-level face recognition benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly-designed search space for each aspect and the comprehensive search. We outperform expert algorithms developed for each single research track by large margins. More importantly, we analyze the difference between our searched optimal design and the independent design of the single factors. We point out that strong models tend to optimize with more difficult training datasets and loss functions. Our empirical study can provide guidance in future research towards more robust face recognition systems.