# Mamba-CNN: A Hybrid Architecture for Efficient and Accurate Facial Beauty Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01431/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision Mamba backbones, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 9 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Vision Mamba backbones](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/vision-mamba-backbones/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Visual Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15956/) (2024)
- [SCUT-FBP5500: A Diverse Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Paradigm Facial Beauty Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06345/) (2018)
- [SCUT-FBP: A Benchmark Dataset for Facial Beauty Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02459/) (2015)
- [Label distribution based facial attractiveness computation by deep residual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.00496/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Scale-interaction transformer: a hybrid cnn-transformer model for facial beauty prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05078/) (2025)
- [SynergyNet: Fusing Generative Priors and State-Space Models for Facial Beauty Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17172/) (2025)
- [FairViT-GAN: A Hybrid Vision Transformer with Adversarial Debiasing for Fair and Explainable Facial Beauty Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23859/) (2025)
- [VM-BeautyNet: A Synergistic Ensemble of Vision Transformer and Mamba for Facial Beauty Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16220/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The computational assessment of facial attractiveness, a challenging subjective regression task, is dominated by architectures with a critical trade-off: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) offer efficiency but have limited receptive fields, while Vision Transformers (ViTs) model global context at a quadratic computational cost. To address this, we propose Mamba-CNN, a novel and efficient hybrid architecture. Mamba-CNN integrates a lightweight, Mamba-inspired State Space Model (SSM) gating mechanism into a hierarchical convolutional backbone. This core innovation allows the network to dynamically modulate feature maps and selectively emphasize salient facial features and their long-range spatial relationships, mirroring human holistic perception while maintaining computational efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments on the widely-used SCUT-FBP5500 benchmark, where our model sets a new state-of-the-art. Mamba-CNN achieves a Pearson Correlation (PC) of 0.9187, a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.2022, and a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.2610. Our findings validate the synergistic potential of combining CNNs with selective SSMs and present a powerful new architectural paradigm for nuanced visual understanding tasks.