Papers › Toward High Quality Facial Representation Learning

Toward High Quality Facial Representation Learning

7 Sep 2023arXiv:2309.03575archive 2025-07-28

Yue Wang, Jinlong Peng, Jiangning Zhang, Ran Yi, Liang Liu, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang

Face analysis tasks have a wide range of applications, but the universal facial representation has only been explored in a few works. In this paper, we explore high-performance pre-training methods to boost the face analysis tasks such as face alignment and face parsing. We propose a self-supervised pre-training framework, called \textbf{\it Mask Contrastive Face (MCF)}, with mask image modeling and a contrastive strategy specially adjusted for face domain tasks. To improve the facial representation quality, we use feature map of a pre-trained visual backbone as a supervision item and use a partially pre-trained decoder for mask image modeling. To handle the face identity during the pre-training stage, we further use random masks to build contrastive learning pairs. We conduct the pre-training on the LAION-FACE-cropped dataset, a variants of LAION-FACE 20M, which contains more than 20 million face images from Internet websites. For efficiency pre-training, we explore our framework pre-training performance on a small part of LAION-FACE-cropped and verify the superiority with different pre-training settings. Our model pre-trained with the full pre-training dataset outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on multiple downstream tasks. Our model achieves 0.932 NME_(diag) for AFLW-19 face alignment and 93.96 F1 score for LaPa face parsing. Code is available at https://github.com/nomewang/MCF.

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Contrastive LearningDecoderFace AlignmentFace ParsingRepresentation Learning

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Contrastive Learning

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