# MGFace: Mask-Gated Face Matching via Conditional Similarity Routing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13187/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.

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

- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Occlusion Robust Face Recognition Based on Mask Learning with PairwiseDifferential Siamese Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06290/) (2019)
- [DeepFace-EMD: Re-ranking Using Patch-wise Earth Mover's Distance Improves Out-Of-Distribution Face Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04016/) (2021)
- [Face Synthesis for Eyeglass-Robust Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01196/) (2018)
- [Enhancing person re-identification via Uncertainty Feature Fusion Method and Auto-weighted Measure Combination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01101/) (2024)
- [Fast and Interpretable Face Identification for Out-Of-Distribution Data Using Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02803/) (2023)
- [A Re-ranking Method using K-nearest Weighted Fusion for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04050/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face identification has achieved remarkable performance under normal conditions. Yet, its accuracy often degrades significantly when query faces are partially occluded, especially by facial masks. Existing re-ranking approaches improve robustness by exploiting patch-level similarities. Still, they often rely on costly, fine-grained matching mechanisms, which limit their efficiency in large-scale retrieval scenarios. In this paper, we propose MGFace, a mask-gated face identification pipeline that predicts the mask status of a query face and conditionally routes the similarity computation accordingly. Specifically, MGFace distinguishes between masked and unmasked queries, applies global embedding matching to unmasked queries, and activates mask-aware patch-level re-ranking only for masked queries. This design focuses on reliable upper-face regions while avoiding unnecessary fine-grained computation. Experiments on the extended LFW-Mask dataset show that MGFace achieves over 80% identification accuracy with the FaceNet backbone and over 90% with the ArcFace backbone. Compared with a previous EMD-based re-ranking method, MGFace achieves better identification performance while reducing query time by approximately 20x. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of MGFace in improving masked-face identification accuracy with low computational overhead. The source code is available at https://github.com/chequanghuy/MGFace.