# BlendFace: Re-designing Identity Encoders for Face-Swapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10854 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10854/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [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)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [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)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [MesoNet: a Compact Facial Video Forgery Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00888/) (2018)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [CurricularFace: Adaptive Curriculum Learning Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00288/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [DF40: Toward Next-Generation Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13495/) (2024)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [Orthogonal Subspace Decomposition for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15633/) (2024)
- [Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17881/) (2024)
- [Face Adapter for Pre-Trained Diffusion Models with Fine-Grained ID and Attribute Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12970/) (2024)
- [Is Artificial Intelligence Generated Image Detection a Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12335/) (2025)
- [Can We Leave Deepfake Data Behind in Training Deepfake Detector?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17052/) (2024)
- [X2-DFD: A framework for eXplainable and eXtendable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06126/) (2024)
- [Celeb-DF++: A Large-scale Challenging Video DeepFake Benchmark for Generalizable Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18015/) (2025)
- [Face Anonymization Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00762/) (2024)
- [Stacking Brick by Brick: Aligned Feature Isolation for Incremental Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11396/) (2024)
- [CanonSwap: High-Fidelity and Consistent Video Face Swapping via Canonical Space Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02691/) (2025)
- [Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19537/) (2024)
- [HiFiVFS: High Fidelity Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18293/) (2024)
- [E4S: Fine-grained Face Swapping via Editing With Regional GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15081/) (2023)
- [ED4: Explicit Data-level Debiasing for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06779/) (2024)
- [Guard Me If You Know Me: Protecting Specific Face-Identity from Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19582/) (2025)
- [PGC: Peak-Guided Calibration for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21207/) (2026)
- [Monocular Identity-Conditioned Facial Reflectance Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00301/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Unified Face Attack Detection via Hierarchical Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13327/) (2025)
- [DGS-Net: Distillation-Guided Gradient Surgery for CLIP Fine-Tuning in AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13108/) (2025)
- [SelfSwapper: Self-Supervised Face Swapping via Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07370/) (2024)
- [BeautyBank: Encoding Facial Makeup in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11231/) (2024)
- [Hiding Faces in Plain Sight: Defending DeepFakes by Disrupting Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01101/) (2024)
- [TriDF: Evaluating Perception, Detection, and Hallucination for Interpretable DeepFake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10652/) (2025)
- [A Large-scale Universal Evaluation Benchmark For Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09181/) (2024)
- [WMamba: Wavelet-based Mamba for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09617/) (2025)
- [Detecting Localized Deepfake Manipulations Using Action Unit-Guided Video Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22121/) (2025)
- [From Cradle to Cane: A Two-Pass Framework for High-Fidelity Lifespan Face Aging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20977/) (2025)
- [DeepfakeBench-MM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22622/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The great advancements of generative adversarial networks and face recognition models in computer vision have made it possible to swap identities on images from single sources. Although a lot of studies seems to have proposed almost satisfactory solutions, we notice previous methods still suffer from an identity-attribute entanglement that causes undesired attributes swapping because widely used identity encoders, eg, ArcFace, have some crucial attribute biases owing to their pretraining on face recognition tasks. To address this issue, we design BlendFace, a novel identity encoder for face-swapping. The key idea behind BlendFace is training face recognition models on blended images whose attributes are replaced with those of another mitigates inter-personal biases such as hairsyles. BlendFace feeds disentangled identity features into generators and guides generators properly as an identity loss function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlendFace improves the identity-attribute disentanglement in face-swapping models, maintaining a comparable quantitative performance to previous methods.