# Adaptive Identity Anchoring: Closed-Loop Keyframe Placement for Synthetic Paired Supervision in Video Face Swapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21434/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [CurricularFace: Adaptive Curriculum Learning Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00288/) (2020)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Focal Frequency Loss for Image Reconstruction and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12821/) (2020)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [Generative Inbetweening: Adapting Image-to-Video Models for Keyframe Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15239/) (2024)
- [CanonSwap: High-Fidelity and Consistent Video Face Swapping via Canonical Space Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02691/) (2025)
- [DreamID: High-Fidelity and Fast diffusion-based Face Swapping via Triplet ID Group Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14509/) (2025)
- [HiFiVFS: High Fidelity Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18293/) (2024)
- [DreamID-V:Bridging the Image-to-Video Gap for High-Fidelity Face Swapping via Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01425/) (2026)
- [VividFace: A Diffusion-Based Hybrid Framework for High-Fidelity Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11279/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video face swapping has no natural paired supervision: no real footage exists of one person's face performing another person's video. The strongest current answer, DreamID-V's SyncID-Pipe, mints pairs by replacing the identity in exactly two frames of a real clip -- the first and the last -- and regenerating the rest from a pose sequence alone. Pose carries no appearance evidence of the swapped-in identity, so over long clips, occlusions, and extreme pose excursions the synthesized identity has a long unanchored span on which to drift; no published ablation examines anchor count or placement. We propose Adaptive Identity Anchoring (AIA): (i) generalize the synthesizer to arbitrary anchor sets, architecturally natural for diffusion-forcing-style transformers where conditioning on a frame is clamping its tokens to zero noise; (ii) place anchors by a closed feedback loop that scores every generated frame against the real reference identity and inserts an image-face-swapped anchor at the worst-scoring frame until the pair passes a threshold or exhausts a budget; (iii) reuse the loop's verdict as an automatic data filter. A second pathology, the beauty-filter look of over-smoothed skin, has the same root cause: micro-texture, like identity, is priced by none of the pipeline's objectives. We therefore pair AIA with Reality-Referenced Texture Restoration: matched re-graining from each real frame's non-face regions, band-split transfer of sub-identity micro-texture from the real footage, and a second, spectral acceptance channel refereed by the footage's own spectrum. Identity-anchor density, we argue, is a controllable quality dial, and we specify falsifiable experiments -- drift-versus-gap curves, uniform-versus-adaptive placement at matched budgets, student training on AIA-minted data, and texture ablations with a human beauty-filter study -- that would validate or refute the proposal.