These results establish frozen DINOv3 as a strong zero-shot representation for region-level facial correspondence and identify intermediate self-supervised features as the most useful layer for dense face analysis.
Abstract
Frozen self-supervised vision models can align parts of generic objects, but it remains unclear whether this correspondence extends to human faces, where global layout is shared while identity-specific appearance varies sharply. We test whether frozen DINOv3 features define a region-level facial coordinate system: a feature space in which eyes, brows, nose, mouth, skin, and hair remain distinguishable across people and across time without face-specific training. Using DINOv3 ViT-L/16 patch embeddings and FaRL only as a face-part labeling interface, we evaluate cross-identity nearest-neighbor matching and temporal label propagation on 200 CelebDF-v2 real videos. DINOv3 achieves 83.0% region-level semantic accuracy under unconstrained cross-identity matching, compared with a 23.0% area-weighted random baseline, and 95.5% temporal tracking accuracy without a learned temporal module. A no-FaRL control collapses to 0.9%, showing that FaRL supplies semantic initialization while DINOv3 supplies dense spatial correspondence. The strongest correspondence appears at an intermediate layer: block 18 gives a 4.93x same-region versus cross-region discrimination ratio, compared with 1.48x at the final block. Against CLIP ViT-L/14, DINOv3 shows only a small aggregate advantage but a +16.8 pp gain on anatomical regions, indicating that image-level contrastive supervision captures coarse facial layout but not fine-grained anatomical identity. These results establish frozen DINOv3 as a strong zero-shot representation for region-level facial correspondence and identify intermediate self-supervised features as the most useful layer for dense face analysis.
Experiments show that DBS achieves a better trade-off between facial fidelity and appearance consistency than existing open-source baselines, while providing a controllable basic framework for holistic identity modeling.
Yuxuan Xiao, Shanshan Zhang, Jian Yang et al.· 0 citations
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have enabled photorealistic novel-view synthesis of 3D scenes and, in the facial domain, have been extended to reconstruct and animate 3D face models from a small number of images. However, existing few-shot dynamic NeRF methods for facial expression editing typically warp a single learned feature volume conditioned on target expression parameters, which can cause identity-specific appearance details (skin texture, fine geometric structure) to drift when the model is driven toward expressions far from those seen in the few-shot input set. We propose Identity-Consistent Expression Fields (ICEF), a framework that explicitly disentangles a static, identity-specific radiance component from a dynamic, expression-conditioned deformation component, and introduces an identity preservation regularizer that constrains the deformation network to modify only expression-relevant regions while leaving identity-specific canonical appearance untouched. ICEF further incorporates a confidence-weighted conditional feature warping step that down-weights unreliable warps for target expressions that are far, in parameter space, from the observed few-shot inputs, mitigating artifacts observed in prior few-shot dynamic NeRF methods when extrapolating to novel expressions. We relate ICEF to prior few-shot dynamic NeRF, static 3D-aware face generation, and disentangled face-editing radiance field methods, and describe an evaluation protocol measuring both novel-expression rendering quality and, specifically, identity-consistency metrics across a range of expression-parameter extrapolation distances.
The concealed facial features make it difficult to identify masked faces. The features are further distorted and deteriorated when masked faces are combined with low resolution and pose variation in unrestricted contexts. Pose variation and low-resolution circumstances, along with face masks, are not assessed for current masked face recognition systems. We developed a transformer-based model a mask-aware geometry-guided vision transformer (MGViT), to address these issues. First, a learnable geometry-guided patch weighting (LGW) is used in the proposed model to suppress occluded regions and concentrate on the key face regions. Second, a mask-aware feature adaptor is created to improve the domain embeddings between masked and unmasked faces. Following that, by combining Identity and Consistency Loss functions to align identity, a strong consistency learning is integrated. Experiments with various challenges are carried out on the various masked face datasets. The proposed model, MGViT, performs well in identifying and verifying low-quality and cross-pose masked faces. Additionally, the model achieves 94.70%, 95.25%, 87.67%, and 78.56% accuracy on RMFRD, Masked LFW, Masked Multi-PIE, and Masked LR, respectively, outperforming the various state-of-the-art methods and previously proposed methods. Facial identity identification in unrestricted real-world environments may benefit from this model.
P. Kaur, Taqdir Kaur, Sahezpreet Singh· Engineering Research Express· 0 citations
Deep face recognition (FR) models reach near-saturated accuracy but remain opaque: a practitioner cannot ask which semantic attributes a similarity score relied upon. EXPL-FR answers this inside the FR model's own embedding space. A lightweight adapter aligns a vision-language model's (VLM) image encoder with the frozen FR space, trained on face images alone and never on text. Because the VLM's encoders share one space, the same adapter applies to the text encoder, turning 978 attribute prompts in 22 categories, also extendable, into FR-space anchors at no extra cost. We do not assume this transfer works: a face-verification protocol measures it, and an ablation changing only the adapter isolates its contribution. Not every concept survives, because an FR model earns its invariances by discarding the factors it must verify identities across. A label-free detectability measure compares each concept's separability in FR space against the VLM space, and the 100 most detectable form the model's readable semantic signature, which separates identities better than the full vocabulary. We cover four FR backbones and two VLM encoders, EXPL-FR needs no architecture access, and supports identity-level, per-image, and differential explanations. We benchmark attribute-level auditing under three supervision settings, human labels (current practice), VLM pseudo-labels, and our fully prompt-driven audit, against real verification behavior. With no labels, the prompt-driven audit ranks four FR models by their measured per-ethnicity RFW errors and ranks controlled attribute changes by their true verification cost.
Guray Ozgur, Mustafa Efe Tamyapar, N. Damer et al.· 0 citations
Generative diffusion models have revolutionized facial image synthesis, yet robust identity preservation in high resolution outputs remains a critical challenge. This issue is especially vital for security systems, biometric authentication, and privacy sensitive applications, where any drift in identity integrity can undermine trust and functionality. We introduce Diff-ID, a diffusion based framework that enforces identity consistency while delivering photorealistic quality. Central to our approach is a custom 210K image dataset synthesized from CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, and LAION-Face and captioned via a fine tuned BLIP model to bolster identity awareness during training. Diff-ID integrates ArcFace and CLIP embeddings through a dual cross attention adapter within a fine tuned Stable Diffusion UNet. To further reinforce identity fidelity, we propose a pseudo discriminator loss based on ArcFace cosine similarity with exponential timestep weighting. Experiments on held out and unseen faces show that Diff-ID does not exceed InstantID in raw ArcFace Face Similarity, but achieves substantially lower FID and the strongest FIQ based identity--realism trade off among the evaluated methods. We also present a unified DDIM based morphing pipeline that enables qualitative facial interpolation without per identity fine tuning. We further argue that identity preservation and photorealism should be evaluated jointly rather than in isolation, as high identity similarity alone does not guarantee realistic outputs. To make this trade off explicit, we report Face Image Quality (FIQ) as a complementary ratio based score that combines identity similarity and perceptual realism while keeping FS and FID as the primary metrics.
T. Rizwan, Sara Atito, Muhammad Awais et al.· 0 citations
The widespread adoption of facial masks, accelerated by COVID-19 and mandated in security-sensitive settings, has exposed limitations of conventional face recognition systems. Existing approaches relying on fixed cosine thresholds, non-adaptive CNNs, and purely data-driven features fail to generalize when facial regions are occluded, creating a gap between lab performance and real-world deployability. This paper proposes PLGSA-Transformer, a cross-modal face matching framework with three contributions. First, Periocular Landmark-Guided Spatial Attention (PLGSA) uses MediaPipe landmarks to compute Gaussian heatmaps over the eye, brow, and forehead regions, fusing them with EfficientNetB3 features via a learnable residual gate to direct attention toward discriminative visible regions. Second, a Hybrid CNN-Transformer Branch reshapes feature maps into tokens processed by a two-layer Multi-Head Self-Attention encoder, enabling cross-regional dependency modelling. Third, the Occlusion-Adaptive Cosine Threshold (OACT) is a jointly trained head that raises the matching threshold in proportion to predicted occlusion severity. The model is evaluated on 858 images from Zenodo MDMFR (60%), Kaggle CelebA-HQ masked collection (25%), and author-collected images (15%), spanning both genders, ages 21-75, with varied mask types, trained via a unified loss combining contrastive verification, identity classification, and occlusion cross-entropy. PLGSA-Transformer achieves 97.22% pair verification accuracy with ROC AUC 1.0000, surpassing VGG-16-based MUFM (Abdullah et al., 2025; 95.0%), HOG classifiers (Adnan et al., 2020; 85.0%), and Feature-based Structural Measure (Shnain et al., 2017; 86.61%). These results confirm that encoding periocular geometry into attention, with Transformer modelling and occlusion-adaptive thresholds, yields a robust, scalable solution for cross-modal masked face recognition.
