# One-shot Neural Face Reenactment via Finding Directions in GAN's Latent Space

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2024.

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

- [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)
- [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)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [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)
- [StyleGAN-V: A Continuous Video Generator with the Price, Image Quality and Perks of StyleGAN2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14683/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in the GAN Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03754/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [StyleRig: Rigging StyleGAN for 3D Control over Portrait Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00121/) (2020)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (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 Detection that Generalizes Across Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06248/) (2025)
- [Are CLIP features all you need for Universal Synthetic Image Origin Attribution?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09153/) (2024)
- [MM2Latent: Text-to-facial image generation and editing in GANs with multimodal assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11010/) (2024)
- [MIMAFace: Face Animation via Motion-Identity Modulated Appearance Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15179/) (2024)
- [HUG-VIS: A Multimodal Benchmark for Human-centered Understanding and Generation in Visual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26517/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present our framework for neural face/head reenactment whose goal is to transfer the 3D head orientation and expression of a target face to a source face. Previous methods focus on learning embedding networks for identity and head pose/expression disentanglement which proves to be a rather hard task, degrading the quality of the generated images. We take a different approach, bypassing the training of such networks, by using (fine-tuned) pre-trained GANs which have been shown capable of producing high-quality facial images. Because GANs are characterized by weak controllability, the core of our approach is a method to discover which directions in latent GAN space are responsible for controlling head pose and expression variations. We present a simple pipeline to learn such directions with the aid of a 3D shape model which, by construction, inherently captures disentangled directions for head pose, identity, and expression. Moreover, we show that by embedding real images in the GAN latent space, our method can be successfully used for the reenactment of real-world faces. Our method features several favorable properties including using a single source image (one-shot) and enabling cross-person reenactment. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results show that our approach typically produces reenacted faces of notably higher quality than those produced by state-of-the-art methods for the standard benchmarks of VoxCeleb1 & 2.