# StyleSwap: Style-Based Generator Empowers Robust Face Swapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13514 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13514/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [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)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [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)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [DeeperForensics-1.0: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03024/) (2020)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (2021)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [DiffFace: Diffusion-based Face Swapping with Facial Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13344/) (2022)
- [PortraitBooth: A Versatile Portrait Model for Fast Identity-preserved Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06354/) (2023)
- [Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17881/) (2024)
- [BlendFace: Re-designing Identity Encoders for Face-Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10854/) (2023)
- [SepMark: Deep Separable Watermarking for Unified Source Tracing and Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06321/) (2023)
- [Fake It till You Make It: Curricular Dynamic Forgery Augmentations towards General Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14444/) (2024)
- [ReSyncer: Rewiring Style-based Generator for Unified Audio-Visually Synced Facial Performer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03284/) (2024)
- [CanonSwap: High-Fidelity and Consistent Video Face Swapping via Canonical Space Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02691/) (2025)
- [StyleLipSync: Style-based Personalized Lip-sync Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00521/) (2023)
- [Reinforced Disentanglement for Face Swapping without Skip Connection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07928/) (2023)
- [Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19537/) (2024)
- [DreamID: High-Fidelity and Fast diffusion-based Face Swapping via Triplet ID Group Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14509/) (2025)
- [Multimodal-driven Talking Face Generation via a Unified Diffusion-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02594/) (2023)
- [HiFiVFS: High Fidelity Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18293/) (2024)
- [ReliableSwap: Boosting General Face Swapping Via Reliable Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05356/) (2023)
- [E4S: Fine-grained Face Swapping via Editing With Regional GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15081/) (2023)
- [3D-Aware Adversarial Makeup Generation for Facial Privacy Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14640/) (2023)
- [Monocular Identity-Conditioned Facial Reflectance Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00301/) (2024)
- [My Face Is Mine, Not Yours: Facial Protection Against Diffusion Model Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15336/) (2025)
- [SelfSwapper: Self-Supervised Face Swapping via Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07370/) (2024)
- [DevFD: Developmental Face Forgery Detection by Learning Shared and Orthogonal LoRA Subspaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19230/) (2025)
- [FlowFace++: Explicit Semantic Flow-supervised End-to-End Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12686/) (2023)
- [Generalized Deepfakes Detection with Reconstructed-Blended Images and Multi-scale Feature Reconstruction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08020/) (2023)
- [Tex-ViT: A Generalizable, Robust, Texture-based dual-branch cross-attention deepfake detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16892/) (2024)
- [FuseAnyPart: Diffusion-Driven Facial Parts Swapping via Multiple Reference Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22771/) (2024)
- [RobustSwap: A Simple yet Robust Face Swapping Model against Attribute Leakage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15768/) (2023)
- [LatentSwap: An Efficient Latent Code Mapping Framework for Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18351/) (2024)
- [Rank-based No-reference Quality Assessment for Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01884/) (2024)
- [The Tug-of-War Between Deepfake Generation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06174/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Numerous attempts have been made to the task of person-agnostic face swapping given its wide applications. While existing methods mostly rely on tedious network and loss designs, they still struggle in the information balancing between the source and target faces, and tend to produce visible artifacts. In this work, we introduce a concise and effective framework named StyleSwap. Our core idea is to leverage a style-based generator to empower high-fidelity and robust face swapping, thus the generator's advantage can be adopted for optimizing identity similarity. We identify that with only minimal modifications, a StyleGAN2 architecture can successfully handle the desired information from both source and target. Additionally, inspired by the ToRGB layers, a Swapping-Driven Mask Branch is further devised to improve information blending. Furthermore, the advantage of StyleGAN inversion can be adopted. Particularly, a Swapping-Guided ID Inversion strategy is proposed to optimize identity similarity. Extensive experiments validate that our framework generates high-quality face swapping results that outperform state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.