# E4S: Fine-grained Face Swapping via Editing With Regional GAN Inversion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15081/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [BiSeNet V2: Bilateral Network with Guided Aggregation for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02147/) (2020)
- [SEAN: Image Synthesis with Semantic Region-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12861/) (2019)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (2021)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity GAN Inversion for Image Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06590/) (2021)
- [Editing in Style: Uncovering the Local Semantics of GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14367/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [Fast Face-swap Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09577/) (2016)
- [Cross-domain Correspondence Learning for Exemplar-based Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05571/) (2020)
- [One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04932/) (2021)

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

- [X2-DFD: A framework for eXplainable and eXtendable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06126/) (2024)
- [Face Anonymization Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00762/) (2024)
- [Towards Unified Multimodal Misinformation Detection in Social Media: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25991/) (2025)
- [MFFI: Multi-Dimensional Face Forgery Image Dataset for Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05592/) (2025)
- [Beauty and the Beast: Imperceptible Perturbations Against Diffusion-Based Face Swapping via Directional Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22744/) (2026)
- [Assessing the Use of Face Swapping Methods as Face Anonymizers in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20985/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Robustness in Post-Processing Watermarking: An Ensemble Attack Network Using CNNs and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03006/) (2025)
- [Decoupling Semantics and Fingerprints: A Universal Representation for AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07074/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel approach to face swapping from the perspective of fine-grained facial editing, dubbed "editing for swapping" (E4S). The traditional face swapping methods rely on global feature extraction and fail to preserve the detailed source identity. In contrast, we propose a Regional GAN Inversion (RGI) method, which allows the explicit disentanglement of shape and texture. Specifically, our E4S performs face swapping in the latent space of a pretrained StyleGAN, where a multi-scale mask-guided encoder is applied to project the texture of each facial component into regional style codes and a mask-guided injection module manipulating feature maps with the style codes. Based on this disentanglement, face swapping can be simplified as style and mask swapping. Besides, due to the large lighting condition gap, transferring the source skin into the target image may lead to disharmony lighting. We propose a re-coloring network to make the swapped face maintain the target lighting condition while preserving the source skin. Further, to deal with the potential mismatch areas during mask exchange, we design a face inpainting module to refine the face shape. The extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our E4S outperforms existing methods in preserving texture, shape, and lighting. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/e4s2024/E4S2024.