# MARLIN: Masked Autoencoder for facial video Representation LearnINg

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06627 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06627/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00926/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [LAA-Net: Localized Artifact Attention Network for Quality-Agnostic and Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13856/) (2024)
- [AV-Deepfake1M: A Large-Scale LLM-Driven Audio-Visual Deepfake Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15308/) (2023)
- [AVFF: Audio-Visual Feature Fusion for Video Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02951/) (2024)
- [Glitch in the Matrix: A Large Scale Benchmark for Content Driven Audio-Visual Forgery Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01979/) (2023)
- [From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05447/) (2023)
- [Masked Image Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06687/) (2024)
- [FSFM: A Generalizable Face Security Foundation Model via Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12032/) (2024)
- [SignMusketeers: An Efficient Multi-Stream Approach for Sign Language Translation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06907/) (2024)
- [LibreFace: An Open-Source Toolkit for Deep Facial Expression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10713/) (2023)
- [Do I Have Your Attention: A Large Scale Engagement Prediction Dataset and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00431/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning with Facial Region Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02138/) (2024)
- [Representation Learning and Identity Adversarial Training for Facial Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11243/) (2024)
- [Face-LLaVA: Facial Expression and Attribute Understanding through Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07198/) (2025)
- [A Timely Survey on Vision Transformer for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08463/) (2024)
- [Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19537/) (2024)
- [Unraveling Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models via the Pipeline Lens: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01364/) (2025)
- [Progressive Representation Learning for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16652/) (2024)
- [UniGaze: Towards Universal Gaze Estimation via Large-scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02307/) (2025)
- [Engagement Measurement Based on Facial Landmarks and Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17175/) (2024)
- [Transformer with Leveraged Masked Autoencoder for video-based Pain Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05088/) (2024)
- [SpeechForensics: Audio-Visual Speech Representation Learning for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09913/) (2025)
- [Evolving from Single-modal to Multi-modal Facial Deepfake Detection: Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06965/) (2024)
- [SMARTe-VR: Student Monitoring and Adaptive Response Technology for e-Learning in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10977/) (2025)
- [Task-adaptive Q-Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09059/) (2024)
- [ProS: Facial Omni-Representation Learning via Prototype-based Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01929/) (2023)
- [JEAN: Joint Expression and Audio-guided NeRF-based Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12156/) (2024)
- [PE-CLIP: A Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16945/) (2025)
- [Hearing Loss Detection from Facial Expressions in One-on-one Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08972/) (2024)
- [MVP: Multimodal Emotion Recognition based on Video and Physiological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03103/) (2025)
- [V-NAW: Video-based Noise-aware Adaptive Weighting for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15970/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a self-supervised approach to learn universal facial representations from videos, that can transfer across a variety of facial analysis tasks such as Facial Attribute Recognition (FAR), Facial Expression Recognition (FER), DeepFake Detection (DFD), and Lip Synchronization (LS). Our proposed framework, named MARLIN, is a facial video masked autoencoder, that learns highly robust and generic facial embeddings from abundantly available non-annotated web crawled facial videos. As a challenging auxiliary task, MARLIN reconstructs the spatio-temporal details of the face from the densely masked facial regions which mainly include eyes, nose, mouth, lips, and skin to capture local and global aspects that in turn help in encoding generic and transferable features. Through a variety of experiments on diverse downstream tasks, we demonstrate MARLIN to be an excellent facial video encoder as well as feature extractor, that performs consistently well across a variety of downstream tasks including FAR (1.13% gain over supervised benchmark), FER (2.64% gain over unsupervised benchmark), DFD (1.86% gain over unsupervised benchmark), LS (29.36% gain for Frechet Inception Distance), and even in low data regime. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/MARLIN .