# IFQA: Interpretable Face Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07077/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [Deep Back-Projection Networks For Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02735/) (2018)
- [GAN Prior Embedded Network for Blind Face Restoration in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06070/) (2021)
- [U-GAT-IT: Unsupervised Generative Attentional Networks with Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10830/) (2019)
- [A U-Net Based Discriminator for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12655/) (2020)
- [SER-FIQ: Unsupervised Estimation of Face Image Quality Based on Stochastic Embedding Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09373/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Enhancing Descriptive Image Quality Assessment with A Large-scale Multi-modal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18842/) (2024)
- [CosmicMan: A Text-to-Image Foundation Model for Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01294/) (2024)
- [DSL-FIQA: Assessing Facial Image Quality via Dual-Set Degradation Learning and Landmark-Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09622/) (2024)
- [Perceptual Quality Assessment of Face Video Compression: A Benchmark and An Effective Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07056/) (2023)
- [PromptIQA: Boosting the Performance and Generalization for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04993/) (2024)
- [F-Bench: Rethinking Human Preference Evaluation Metrics for Benchmarking Face Generation, Customization, and Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13155/) (2024)
- [Dual-Branch Network for Portrait Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08555/) (2024)
- [Towards Real-world Video Face Restoration: A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19500/) (2024)
- [Gamma: Toward Generic Image Assessment with Mixture of Assessment Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06678/) (2025)
- [Generative Models at the Frontier of Compression: A Survey on Generative Face Video Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07369/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised Adaptive Pre-training of Multilingual Speech Models for Language and Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07338/) (2023)
- [Surveillance Facial Image Quality Assessment: A Multi-dimensional Dataset and Lightweight Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07403/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Multilingual Speech Recognition through Language Prompt Tuning and Frame-Level Language Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09443/) (2023)
- [GMTR: Graph Matching Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08141/) (2023)
- [DarkShot: Lighting Dark Images with Low-Compute and High-Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16805/) (2023)
- [TRLS: A Time Series Representation Learning Framework via Spectrogram for Medical Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05431/) (2024)
- [TEN-GUARD: Tensor Decomposition for Backdoor Attack Detection in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05432/) (2024)
- [T-Pixel2Mesh: Combining Global and Local Transformer for 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13663/) (2024)
- [Strategic Arms with Side Communication Prevail Over Low-Regret MAB Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17101/) (2024)
- [Towards General Deepfake Detection with Dynamic Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11162/) (2024)
- [Attr-Int: A Simple and Effective Entity Alignment Framework for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13409/) (2024)
- [Mask6D: Masked Pose Priors For 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06486/) (2025)
- [A Lightweight Ensemble-Based Face Image Quality Assessment Method with Correlation-Aware Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10114/) (2025)
- [Employing Vision-Language Models for Face Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17489/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing face restoration models have relied on general assessment metrics that do not consider the characteristics of facial regions. Recent works have therefore assessed their methods using human studies, which is not scalable and involves significant effort. This paper proposes a novel face-centric metric based on an adversarial framework where a generator simulates face restoration and a discriminator assesses image quality. Specifically, our per-pixel discriminator enables interpretable evaluation that cannot be provided by traditional metrics. Moreover, our metric emphasizes facial primary regions considering that even minor changes to the eyes, nose, and mouth significantly affect human cognition. Our face-oriented metric consistently surpasses existing general or facial image quality assessment metrics by impressive margins. We demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed strategy in various architectural designs and challenging scenarios. Interestingly, we find that our IFQA can lead to performance improvement as an objective function.