# IConFace: Fine-Grained Identity Conditioning for Reference-Aware Face Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02814/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [MagFace: A Universal Representation for Face Recognition and Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06627/) (2021)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [GAN Prior Embedded Network for Blind Face Restoration in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06070/) (2021)
- [VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06803/) (2022)
- [Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00418/) (2020)
- [RestoreFormer: High-Quality Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06374/) (2022)
- [PGDiff: Guiding Diffusion Models for Versatile Face Restoration via Partial Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10810/) (2023)
- [Learning Dual Memory Dictionaries for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08160/) (2022)
- [RestoreFormer++: Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07228/) (2023)
- [OSDFace: One-Step Diffusion Model for Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17163/) (2024)
- [Dual Associated Encoder for Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07314/) (2023)
- [Towards Authentic Face Restoration with Iterative Diffusion Models and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08996/) (2023)
- [ReF-LDM: A Latent Diffusion Model for Reference-based Face Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05043/) (2024)
- [FaceMe: Robust Blind Face Restoration with Personal Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05177/) (2025)
- [TPGDiff: Hierarchical Triple-Prior Guided Diffusion for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20306/) (2026)
- [Unlocking the Potential of Diffusion Priors in Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08556/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Severe face degradation can remove person-specific evidence, making restoration underdetermined. A generative prior may recover a sharp, plausible face yet miss localized traits that persist across images of the same person. Same-identity references supply this missing evidence, while the degraded observation anchors target structure. We propose IConFace, a fine-grained identity-conditioned framework that optionally conditions restoration on up to three same-identity references. Its hybrid concat backbone retains degraded and reference observations as dense visual tokens, preserving localized reference evidence. An identity pathway provides compact multi-reference guidance, while a degraded-structure pathway injects full-field and local-residual memories to reinforce target-aligned structure. We also introduce a human-audited benchmark that measures whether persistent localized identity details survive restoration. IConFace achieves leading reference compatibility, especially under severe degradation, and the highest observed preservation rate on this benchmark. Without references, it achieves leading learned perceptual quality across five blind-restoration benchmarks. Joint reference-based and paired-target evaluations show that reference-supported identity recovery and exact target agreement are complementary.