# From Autoencoders to CycleGAN: Robust Unpaired Face Manipulation via Adversarial Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12176/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [CVAE-GAN: Fine-Grained Image Generation through Asymmetric Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10155/) (2017)
- [Autoregressive Quantile Networks for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05575/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human face synthesis and manipulation are increasingly important in entertainment and AI, with a growing demand for highly realistic, identity-preserving images even when only unpaired, unaligned datasets are available. We study unpaired face manipulation via adversarial learning, moving from autoencoder baselines to a robust, guided CycleGAN framework. While autoencoders capture coarse identity, they often miss fine details. Our approach integrates spectral normalization for stable training, identity- and perceptual-guided losses to preserve subject identity and high-level structure, and landmark-weighted cycle constraints to maintain facial geometry across pose and illumination changes. Experiments show that our adversarial trained CycleGAN improves realism (FID), perceptual quality (LPIPS), and identity preservation (ID-Sim) over autoencoders, with competitive cycle-reconstruction SSIM and practical inference times, which achieved high quality without paired datasets and approaching pix2pix on curated paired subsets. These results demonstrate that guided, spectrally normalized CycleGANs provide a practical path from autoencoders to robust unpaired face manipulation.