# MSConv: Multiplicative and Subtractive Convolution for Face Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06187/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [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)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [CondConv: Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04971/) (2019)
- [Cross-Age LFW: A Database for Studying Cross-Age Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08197/) (2017)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [RetinaFace: Single-stage Dense Face Localisation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00641/) (2019)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [GhostNetV2: Enhance Cheap Operation with Long-Range Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12905/) (2022)
- [Masked Face Recognition Challenge: The InsightFace Track Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08191/) (2021)
- [Towards Universal Backward-Compatible Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01583/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Neural Networks, there are various methods of feature fusion. Different strategies can significantly affect the effectiveness of feature representation, consequently influencing the ability of model to extract representative and discriminative features. In the field of face recognition, traditional feature fusion methods include feature concatenation and feature addition. Recently, various attention mechanism-based fusion strategies have emerged. However, we found that these methods primarily focus on the important features in the image, referred to as salient features in this paper, while neglecting another equally important set of features for image recognition tasks, which we term differential features. This may cause the model to overlook critical local differences when dealing with complex facial samples. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient convolution module called MSConv (Multiplicative and Subtractive Convolution), designed to balance the learning of model about salient and differential features. Specifically, we employ multi-scale mixed convolution to capture both local and broader contextual information from face images, and then utilize Multiplication Operation (MO) and Subtraction Operation (SO) to extract salient and differential features, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that by integrating both salient and differential features, MSConv outperforms models that only focus on salient features.