Some Optimizers are More Equal: Understanding the Role of Optimizers in Group Fairness

We study whether and how the choice of optimization algorithm can impact group fairness in deep neural networks. Through stochastic differential equation analysis of optimization dynamics in an analytically tractable setup, we demonstrate that the choice of optimization algorithm indeed influences fairness outcomes, particularly under severe imbalance. Furthermore, we show that when comparing two categories of optimizers, adaptive methods and stochastic methods, RMSProp (from the adaptive category) has a higher likelihood of converging to fairer minima than SGD (from the stochastic category). Building on this insight, we derive two new theoretical guarantees showing that, under appropriate conditions, RMSProp exhibits fairer parameter updates and improved fairness in a single optimization step compared to SGD. We then validate these findings through extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, namely CelebA, FairFace, and MS-COCO, across different tasks as facial expression recognition, gender classification, and multi-label classification, using various backbones. Considering multiple fairness definitions including equalized odds, equal opportunity, and demographic parity, adaptive optimizers like RMSProp and Adam consistently outperform SGD in terms of group fairness, while maintaining comparable predictive accuracy. Our results highlight the role of adaptive updates as a crucial yet overlooked mechanism for promoting fair outcomes.

Learning a Canonical Basis of Human Preferences from Binary Ratings

Recent advances in generative AI have been driven by alignment techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). RLHF and related techniques typically involve constructing a dataset of binary or ranked choice human preferences and subsequently fine-tuning models to align with these preferences. This paper shifts the focus to understanding the preferences encoded in such datasets and identifying common human preferences. We find that a small subset of 21 preference categories (selected from a set of nearly 5,000 distinct preferences) captures >89% of preference variation across individuals. This small set of preferences is analogous to a canonical basis of human preferences, similar to established findings that characterize human variation in psychology or facial recognition studies. Through both synthetic and empirical evaluations, we confirm that our low-rank, canonical set of human preferences generalizes across the entire dataset and within specific topics. We further demonstrate our preference basis' utility in model evaluation, where our preference categories offer deeper insights into model alignment, and in model training, where we show that fine-tuning on preference-defined subsets successfully aligns the model accordingly.

Privacy-preserving Preselection for Face Identification Based on Packing

Face identification systems operating in the ciphertext domain have garnered significant attention due to increasing privacy concerns and the potential recovery of original facial data. However, as the size of ciphertext template libraries grows, the face retrieval process becomes progressively more time-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel and efficient scheme for face retrieval in the ciphertext domain, termed Privacy-Preserving Preselection for Face Identification Based on Packing (PFIP). PFIP incorporates an innovative preselection mechanism to reduce computational overhead and a packing module to enhance the flexibility of biometric systems during the enrollment stage. Extensive experiments conducted on the LFW and CASIA datasets demonstrate that PFIP preserves the accuracy of the original face recognition model, achieving a 100% hit rate while retrieving 1,000 ciphertext face templates within 300 milliseconds. Compared to existing approaches, PFIP achieves a nearly 50x improvement in retrieval efficiency.

Mixture-of-Attack-Experts with Class Regularization for Unified Physical-Digital Face Attack Detection

Facial recognition systems in real-world scenarios are susceptible to both digital and physical attacks. Previous methods have attempted to achieve classification by learning a comprehensive feature space. However, these methods have not adequately accounted for the inherent characteristics of physical and digital attack data, particularly the large intra class variation in attacks and the small inter-class variation between live and fake faces. To address these limitations, we propose the Fine-Grained MoE with Class-Aware Regularization CLIP framework (FG-MoE-CLIP-CAR), incorporating key improvements at both the feature and loss levels. At the feature level, we employ a Soft Mixture of Experts (Soft MoE) architecture to leverage different experts for specialized feature processing. Additionally, we refine the Soft MoE to capture more subtle differences among various types of fake faces. At the loss level, we introduce two constraint modules: the Disentanglement Module (DM) and the Cluster Distillation Module (CDM). The DM enhances class separability by increasing the distance between the centers of live and fake face classes. However, center-to-center constraints alone are insufficient to ensure distinctive representations for individual features. Thus, we propose the CDM to further cluster features around their respective class centers while maintaining separation from other classes. Moreover, specific attacks that significantly deviate from common attack patterns are often overlooked. To address this issue, our distance calculation prioritizes more distant features. Experimental results on two unified physical-digital attack datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Diffusion-based Adversarial Identity Manipulation for Facial Privacy Protection

The success of face recognition (FR) systems has led to serious privacy concerns due to potential unauthorized surveillance and user tracking on social networks. Existing methods for enhancing privacy fail to generate natural face images that can protect facial privacy. In this paper, we propose diffusion-based adversarial identity manipulation (DiffAIM) to generate natural and highly transferable adversarial faces against malicious FR systems. To be specific, we manipulate facial identity within the low-dimensional latent space of a diffusion model. This involves iteratively injecting gradient-based adversarial identity guidance during the reverse diffusion process, progressively steering the generation toward the desired adversarial faces. The guidance is optimized for identity convergence towards a target while promoting semantic divergence from the source, facilitating effective impersonation while maintaining visual naturalness. We further incorporate structure-preserving regularization to preserve facial structure consistency during manipulation. Extensive experiments on both face verification and identification tasks demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art, DiffAIM achieves stronger black-box attack transferability while maintaining superior visual quality. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for commercial FR APIs, including Face++ and Aliyun.

FIESTA: Fisher Information-based Efficient Selective Test-time Adaptation

Robust facial expression recognition in unconstrained, "in-the-wild" environments remains challenging due to significant domain shifts between training and testing distributions. Test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a promising solution by adapting pre-trained models during inference without requiring labeled test data. However, existing TTA approaches typically rely on manually selecting which parameters to update, potentially leading to suboptimal adaptation and high computational costs. This paper introduces a novel Fisher-driven selective adaptation framework that dynamically identifies and updates only the most critical model parameters based on their importance as quantified by Fisher information. By integrating this principled parameter selection approach with temporal consistency constraints, our method enables efficient and effective adaptation specifically tailored for video-based facial expression recognition. Experiments on the challenging AffWild2 benchmark demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing TTA methods, achieving a 7.7% improvement in F1 score over the base model while adapting only 22,000 parameters-more than 20 times fewer than comparable methods. Our ablation studies further reveal that parameter importance can be effectively estimated from minimal data, with sampling just 1-3 frames sufficient for substantial performance gains. The proposed approach not only enhances recognition accuracy but also dramatically reduces computational overhead, making test-time adaptation more practical for real-world affective computing applications.

Face Spoofing Detection using Deep Learning

Digital image spoofing has emerged as a significant security threat in biometric authentication systems, particularly those relying on facial recognition. This study evaluates the performance of three vision based models, MobileNetV2, ResNET50, and Vision Transformer, ViT, for spoof detection in image classification, utilizing a dataset of 150,986 images divided into training , 140,002, testing, 10,984, and validation ,39,574, sets. Spoof detection is critical for enhancing the security of image recognition systems, and this research compares the models effectiveness through accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score metrics. Results reveal that MobileNetV2 outperforms other architectures on the test dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.59%, precision of 91.72%, recall of 91.59%, and F1 score of 91.58%, compared to ViT 86.54%, 88.28%, 86.54%, and 86.39%, respectively. On the validation dataset, MobileNetV2, and ViT excel, with MobileNetV2 slightly ahead at 97.17% accuracy versus ViT 96.36%. MobileNetV2 demonstrates faster convergence during training and superior generalization to unseen data, despite both models showing signs of overfitting. These findings highlight MobileNetV2 balanced performance and robustness, making it the preferred choice for spoof detection applications where reliability on new data is essential. The study underscores the importance of model selection in security sensitive contexts and suggests MobileNetV2 as a practical solution for real world deployment.

Visual and textual prompts for enhancing emotion recognition in video

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) exhibit promising potential for multi-modal understanding, yet their application to video-based emotion recognition remains limited by insufficient spatial and contextual awareness. Traditional approaches, which prioritize isolated facial features, often neglect critical non-verbal cues such as body language, environmental context, and social interactions, leading to reduced robustness in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we propose Set-of-Vision-Text Prompting (SoVTP), a novel framework that enhances zero-shot emotion recognition by integrating spatial annotations (e.g., bounding boxes, facial landmarks), physiological signals (facial action units), and contextual cues (body posture, scene dynamics, others' emotions) into a unified prompting strategy. SoVTP preserves holistic scene information while enabling fine-grained analysis of facial muscle movements and interpersonal dynamics. Extensive experiments show that SoVTP achieves substantial improvements over existing visual prompting methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing VLLMs' video emotion recognition capabilities.

Towards Large-Scale Pose-Invariant Face Recognition Using Face Defrontalization

Face recognition under extreme head poses is a challenging task. Ideally, a face recognition system should perform well across different head poses, which is known as pose-invariant face recognition. To achieve pose invariance, current approaches rely on sophisticated methods, such as face frontalization and various facial feature extraction model architectures. However, these methods are somewhat impractical in real-life settings and are typically evaluated on small scientific datasets, such as Multi-PIE. In this work, we propose the inverse method of face frontalization, called face defrontalization, to augment the training dataset of facial feature extraction model. The method does not introduce any time overhead during the inference step. The method is composed of: 1) training an adapted face defrontalization FFWM model on a frontal-profile pairs dataset, which has been preprocessed using our proposed face alignment method; 2) training a ResNet-50 facial feature extraction model based on ArcFace loss on a raw and randomly defrontalized large-scale dataset, where defrontalization was performed with our previously trained face defrontalization model. Our method was compared with the existing approaches on four open-access datasets: LFW, AgeDB, CFP, and Multi-PIE. Defrontalization shows improved results compared to models without defrontalization, while the proposed adjustments show clear superiority over the state-of-the-art face frontalization FFWM method on three larger open-access datasets, but not on the small Multi-PIE dataset for extreme poses (75 and 90 degrees). The results suggest that at least some of the current methods may be overfitted to small datasets.

FA^{3}-CLIP: Frequency-Aware Cues Fusion and Attack-Agnostic Prompt Learning for Unified Face Attack Detection

Facial recognition systems are vulnerable to physical (e.g., printed photos) and digital (e.g., DeepFake) face attacks. Existing methods struggle to simultaneously detect physical and digital attacks due to: 1) significant intra-class variations between these attack types, and 2) the inadequacy of spatial information alone to comprehensively capture live and fake cues. To address these issues, we propose a unified attack detection model termed Frequency-Aware and Attack-Agnostic CLIP (FA\textsuperscript{3}-CLIP), which introduces attack-agnostic prompt learning to express generic live and fake cues derived from the fusion of spatial and frequency features, enabling unified detection of live faces and all categories of attacks. Specifically, the attack-agnostic prompt module generates generic live and fake prompts within the language branch to extract corresponding generic representations from both live and fake faces, guiding the model to learn a unified feature space for unified attack detection. Meanwhile, the module adaptively generates the live/fake conditional bias from the original spatial and frequency information to optimize the generic prompts accordingly, reducing the impact of intra-class variations. We further propose a dual-stream cues fusion framework in the vision branch, which leverages frequency information to complement subtle cues that are difficult to capture in the spatial domain. In addition, a frequency compression block is utilized in the frequency stream, which reduces redundancy in frequency features while preserving the diversity of crucial cues. We also establish new challenging protocols to facilitate unified face attack detection effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves performance in detecting physical and digital face attacks, achieving state-of-the-art results.