# Subjective Face Transform using Human First Impressions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15381/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 123 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (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)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [FFJORD: Free-form Continuous Dynamics for Scalable Reversible Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01367/) (2018)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15640/) (2021)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [FreeDoM: Training-Free Energy-Guided Conditional Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09833/) (2023)
- [NIPS 2016 Tutorial: Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00160/) (2016)
- [Deep Face Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06655/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans tend to form quick subjective first impressions of non-physical attributes when seeing someone's face, such as perceived trustworthiness or attractiveness. To understand what variations in a face lead to different subjective impressions, this work uses generative models to find semantically meaningful edits to a face image that change perceived attributes. Unlike prior work that relied on statistical manipulation in feature space, our end-to-end framework considers trade-offs between preserving identity and changing perceptual attributes. It maps latent space directions to changes in attribute scores, enabling a perceptually significant identity-preserving transformation of any input face along an attribute axis according to a target change. We train on real and synthetic faces, evaluate for in-domain and out-of-domain images using predictive models and human ratings, demonstrating the generalizability of our approach. Ultimately, such a framework can be used to understand and explain trends and biases in subjective interpretation of faces that are not dependent on the subject's identity. This is demonstrated with improved model performance for first impression prediction when augmenting the training data with images generated by the proposed approach for a wider range of input to learn associations between face features and subjective attributes.