# ErasableMask: A Robust and Erasable Privacy Protection Scheme against Black-box Face Recognition Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17038 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17038/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Deep Face Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06655/) (2018)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)
- [Efficient Decision-based Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04433/) (2019)
- [AdvHat: Real-world adversarial attack on ArcFace Face ID system](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08705/) (2019)
- [MBRS : Enhancing Robustness of DNN-based Watermarking by Mini-Batch of Real and Simulated JPEG Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08211/) (2021)
- [Adv-Makeup: A New Imperceptible and Transferable Attack on Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03162/) (2021)
- [SemanticAdv: Generating Adversarial Examples via Attribute-conditional Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07927/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Generalisation with Meta Auxiliary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08933/) (2019)
- [Regularized Fine-grained Meta Face Anti-spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10771/) (2019)
- [Towards Transferable Adversarial Attack against Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05790/) (2020)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Patches on Face Recognition with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15058/) (2021)
- [Protecting Facial Privacy: Generating Adversarial Identity Masks via Style-robust Makeup Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03121/) (2022)
- [Towards Face Encryption by Generating Adversarial Identity Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06814/) (2020)
- [AdvFaces: Adversarial Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05008/) (2019)
- [Improved Residual Networks for Image and Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04989/) (2020)
- [WavMark: Watermarking for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12770/) (2023)
- [Adv-Attribute: Inconspicuous and Transferable Adversarial Attack on Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06871/) (2022)
- [CLIP2Protect: Protecting Facial Privacy using Text-Guided Makeup via Adversarial Latent Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10008/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Adversarial Attacks for Good: A Survey of Proactive Protection across the Visual Content Lifecycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04314/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While face recognition (FR) models have brought remarkable convenience in face verification and identification, they also pose substantial privacy risks to the public. Existing facial privacy protection schemes usually adopt adversarial examples to disrupt face verification of FR models. However, these schemes often suffer from weak transferability against black-box FR models and permanently damage the identifiable information that cannot fulfill the requirements of authorized operations such as forensics and authentication. To address these limitations, we propose ErasableMask, a robust and erasable privacy protection scheme against black-box FR models. Specifically, via rethinking the inherent relationship between surrogate FR models, ErasableMask introduces a novel meta-auxiliary attack, which boosts black-box transferability by learning more general features in a stable and balancing optimization strategy. It also offers a perturbation erasion mechanism that supports the erasion of semantic perturbations in protected face without degrading image quality. To further improve performance, ErasableMask employs a curriculum learning strategy to mitigate optimization conflicts between adversarial attack and perturbation erasion. Extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ and FFHQ datasets demonstrate that ErasableMask achieves the state-of-the-art performance in transferability, achieving over 72% confidence on average in commercial FR systems. Moreover, ErasableMask also exhibits outstanding perturbation erasion performance, achieving over 90% erasion success rate.