# Mitigating Knowledge Discrepancies among Multiple Datasets for Task-agnostic Unified Face Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [General Facial Representation Learning in a Visual-Linguistic Manner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03109/) (2021)
- [A Review of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08641/) (2020)
- [Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10483/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Wing Loss for Robust Face Alignment via Heatmap Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07399/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Object Landmarks through Conditional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07823/) (2018)
- [Wing Loss for Robust Facial Landmark Localisation with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06753/) (2017)
- [LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks' Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02980/) (2020)
- [Pixel-in-Pixel Net: Towards Efficient Facial Landmark Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03771/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Object Landmarks as Structural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04412/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Part-Based Disentangling of Object Shape and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06946/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised learning of object landmarks by factorized spatial embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02193/) (2017)
- [Style Aggregated Network for Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04108/) (2018)
- [Structured Landmark Detection via Topology-Adapting Deep Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08190/) (2020)
- [Sparse Local Patch Transformer for Robust Face Alignment and Landmarks Inherent Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06541/) (2022)
- [DeCaFA: Deep Convolutional Cascade for Face Alignment In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02549/) (2019)
- [Deep Alignment Network: A convolutional neural network for robust face alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01789/) (2017)
- [STAR Loss: Reducing Semantic Ambiguity in Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02763/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Self-Supervised and Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14711/) (2021)
- [ADNet: Leveraging Error-Bias Towards Normal Direction in Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05721/) (2021)
- [Aggregation via Separation: Boosting Facial Landmark Detector with Semi-Supervised Style Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06440/) (2019)

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

- [ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19900/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the similar structures of human faces, existing face alignment methods cannot learn unified knowledge from multiple datasets with different landmark annotations. The limited training samples in a single dataset commonly result in fragile robustness in this field. To mitigate knowledge discrepancies among different datasets and train a task-agnostic unified face alignment (TUFA) framework, this paper presents a strategy to unify knowledge from multiple datasets. Specifically, we calculate a mean face shape for each dataset. To explicitly align these mean shapes on an interpretable plane based on their semantics, each shape is then incorporated with a group of semantic alignment embeddings. The 2D coordinates of these aligned shapes can be viewed as the anchors of the plane. By encoding them into structure prompts and further regressing the corresponding facial landmarks using image features, a mapping from the plane to the target faces is finally established, which unifies the learning target of different datasets. Consequently, multiple datasets can be utilized to boost the generalization ability of the model. The successful mitigation of discrepancies also enhances the efficiency of knowledge transferring to a novel dataset, significantly boosts the performance of few-shot face alignment. Additionally, the interpretable plane endows TUFA with a task-agnostic characteristic, enabling it to locate landmarks unseen during training in a zero-shot manner. Extensive experiments are carried on seven benchmarks and the results demonstrate an impressive improvement in face alignment brought by knowledge discrepancies mitigation. The code is available at https://github.com/Jiahao-UTS/TUFA.