# Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01191/) (2022)
- [Searching Central Difference Convolutional Networks for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04092/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Models for Face Anti-Spoofing: Binary or Auxiliary Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11097/) (2018)
- [Single-Side Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14043/) (2020)
- [NAS-FAS: Static-Dynamic Central Difference Network Search for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02062/) (2020)
- [L2-constrained Softmax Loss for Discriminative Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09507/) (2017)
- [Cross-domain Face Presentation Attack Detection via Multi-domain Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01959/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Shuffled Style Assembly for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05340/) (2022)
- [PatchNet: A Simple Face Anti-Spoofing Framework via Fine-Grained Patch Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14325/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Normalized Representation Learning for Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02667/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Domain Generalization for Face Anti-spoofing: Separability and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13662/) (2023)
- [Dual Reweighting Domain Generalization for Face Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16128/) (2021)
- [Generalizable Representation Learning for Mixture Domain Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02453/) (2021)
- [FLIP: Cross-domain Face Anti-spoofing with Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16649/) (2023)
- [Instance-Aware Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05640/) (2023)
- [CFPL-FAS: Class Free Prompt Learning for Generalizable Face Anti-spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14333/) (2024)
- [Gradient Alignment for Cross-Domain Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18817/) (2024)
- [Towards Data-Centric Face Anti-Spoofing: Improving Cross-domain Generalization via Physics-based Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03501/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Face Anti-Spoofing: Enhancing Generalization with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01720/) (2025)

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

- [Foundation Models for Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Unified Linear-Probing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26993/) (2026)
- [DINO-VPT: Hierarchical Visual Prompt Tuning for Joint Physical-Digital Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20900/) (2026)
- [LoRA-based Adaptation Alone Is Not Enough: Understanding the Limits of Foundation Models for Face Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09633/) (2026)
- [Foundation and Multimodal Large Language Models for Face Presentation and Morph Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29802/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .