# FlowFace: Semantic Flow-guided Shape-aware Face Swapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02797/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2022.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Representations for Labeling Pixels and Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04514/) (2019)
- [One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04932/) (2021)
- [HifiFace: 3D Shape and Semantic Prior Guided High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09965/) (2021)
- [On Face Segmentation, Face Swapping, and Face Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06729/) (2017)
- [High-resolution Face Swapping via Latent Semantics Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15958/) (2022)
- [Region-Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04564/) (2022)
- [A Compact Embedding for Facial Expression Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11283/) (2018)
- [Smooth-Swap: A Simple Enhancement for Face-Swapping with Smoothness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05907/) (2021)
- [FaceController: Controllable Attribute Editing for Face in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11464/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17881/) (2024)
- [Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19537/) (2024)
- [Multimodal-driven Talking Face Generation via a Unified Diffusion-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02594/) (2023)
- [FlowFace++: Explicit Semantic Flow-supervised End-to-End Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12686/) (2023)
- [Towards High Fidelity Face Swapping: A Comprehensive Survey and New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00883/) (2026)
- [VFace: A Training-Free Approach for Diffusion-Based Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07835/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we propose a semantic flow-guided two-stage framework for shape-aware face swapping, namely FlowFace. Unlike most previous methods that focus on transferring the source inner facial features but neglect facial contours, our FlowFace can transfer both of them to a target face, thus leading to more realistic face swapping. Concretely, our FlowFace consists of a face reshaping network and a face swapping network. The face reshaping network addresses the shape outline differences between the source and target faces. It first estimates a semantic flow (i.e., face shape differences) between the source and the target face, and then explicitly warps the target face shape with the estimated semantic flow. After reshaping, the face swapping network generates inner facial features that exhibit the identity of the source face. We employ a pre-trained face masked autoencoder (MAE) to extract facial features from both the source face and the target face. In contrast to previous methods that use identity embedding to preserve identity information, the features extracted by our encoder can better capture facial appearances and identity information. Then, we develop a cross-attention fusion module to adaptively fuse inner facial features from the source face with the target facial attributes, thus leading to better identity preservation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on in-the-wild faces demonstrate that our FlowFace outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.