# ReliableSwap: Boosting General Face Swapping Via Reliable Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05356 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05356/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (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)
- [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)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Filter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09673/) (2016)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09043/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [Fast Face-swap Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09577/) (2016)
- [SER-FIQ: Unsupervised Estimation of Face Image Quality Based on Stochastic Embedding Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09373/) (2020)
- [One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04932/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17881/) (2024)
- [Face Anonymization Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00762/) (2024)
- [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)
- [FaceShield: Defending Facial Image against Deepfake Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09921/) (2024)
- [SelfSwapper: Self-Supervised Face Swapping via Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07370/) (2024)
- [DirectSwap: Paired, Mask-Free Video Head Swapping with Full-Reference Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09417/) (2025)
- [APPLE: Attribute-Preserving Pseudo-Labeling for Diffusion-Based Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15288/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Almost all advanced face swapping approaches use reconstruction as the proxy task, i.e., supervision only exists when the target and source belong to the same person. Otherwise, lacking pixel-level supervision, these methods struggle for source identity preservation. This paper proposes to construct reliable supervision, dubbed cycle triplets, which serves as the image-level guidance when the source identity differs from the target one during training. Specifically, we use face reenactment and blending techniques to synthesize the swapped face from real images in advance, where the synthetic face preserves source identity and target attributes. However, there may be some artifacts in such a synthetic face. To avoid the potential artifacts and drive the distribution of the network output close to the natural one, we reversely take synthetic images as input while the real face as reliable supervision during the training stage of face swapping. Besides, we empirically find that the existing methods tend to lose lower-face details like face shape and mouth from the source. This paper additionally designs a FixerNet, providing discriminative embeddings of lower faces as an enhancement. Our face swapping framework, named ReliableSwap, can boost the performance of any existing face swapping network with negligible overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our ReliableSwap, especially in identity preservation. The project page is https://reliable-swap.github.io/.