Attributes Shape the Embedding Space of Face Recognition Models

Face Recognition (FR) tasks have made significant progress with the advent of Deep Neural Networks, particularly through margin-based triplet losses that embed facial images into high-dimensional feature spaces. During training, these contrastive losses focus exclusively on identity information as labels. However, we observe a multiscale geometric structure emerging in the embedding space, influenced by interpretable facial (e.g., hair color) and image attributes (e.g., contrast). We propose a geometric approach to describe the dependence or invariance of FR models to these attributes and introduce a physics-inspired alignment metric. We evaluate the proposed metric on controlled, simplified models and widely used FR models fine-tuned with synthetic data for targeted attribute augmentation. Our findings reveal that the models exhibit varying degrees of invariance across different attributes, providing insight into their strengths and weaknesses and enabling deeper interpretability. Code available here: https://github.com/mantonios107/attrs-fr-embs}{https://github.com/mantonios107/attrs-fr-embs

Non-Adaptive Adversarial Face Generation

Adversarial attacks on face recognition systems (FRSs) pose serious security and privacy threats, especially when these systems are used for identity verification. In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating adversarial faces-synthetic facial images that are visually distinct yet recognized as a target identity by the FRS. Unlike iterative optimization-based approaches (e.g., gradient descent or other iterative solvers), our method leverages the structural characteristics of the FRS feature space. We figure out that individuals sharing the same attribute (e.g., gender or race) form an attributed subsphere. By utilizing such subspheres, our method achieves both non-adaptiveness and a remarkably small number of queries. This eliminates the need for relying on transferability and open-source surrogate models, which have been a typical strategy when repeated adaptive queries to commercial FRSs are impossible. Despite requiring only a single non-adaptive query consisting of 100 face images, our method achieves a high success rate of over 93% against AWS's CompareFaces API at its default threshold. Furthermore, unlike many existing attacks that perturb a given image, our method can deliberately produce adversarial faces that impersonate the target identity while exhibiting high-level attributes chosen by the adversary.

Degradation-Agnostic Statistical Facial Feature Transformation for Blind Face Restoration in Adverse Weather Conditions

With the increasing deployment of intelligent CCTV systems in outdoor environments, there is a growing demand for face recognition systems optimized for challenging weather conditions. Adverse weather significantly degrades image quality, which in turn reduces recognition accuracy. Although recent face image restoration (FIR) models based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models have shown progress, their performance remains limited due to the lack of dedicated modules that explicitly address weather-induced degradations. This leads to distorted facial textures and structures. To address these limitations, we propose a novel GAN-based blind FIR framework that integrates two key components: local Statistical Facial Feature Transformation (SFFT) and Degradation-Agnostic Feature Embedding (DAFE). The local SFFT module enhances facial structure and color fidelity by aligning the local statistical distributions of low-quality (LQ) facial regions with those of high-quality (HQ) counterparts. Complementarily, the DAFE module enables robust statistical facial feature extraction under adverse weather conditions by aligning LQ and HQ encoder representations, thereby making the restoration process adaptive to severe weather-induced degradations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed degradation-agnostic SFFT model outperforms existing state-of-the-art FIR methods based on GAN and diffusion models, particularly in suppressing texture distortions and accurately reconstructing facial structures. Furthermore, both the SFFT and DAFE modules are empirically validated in enhancing structural fidelity and perceptual quality in face restoration under challenging weather scenarios.

FG 2025 TrustFAA: the First Workshop on Towards Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis: Advancing Insights of Fairness, Explainability, and Safety (TrustFAA)

With the increasing prevalence and deployment of Emotion AI-powered facial affect analysis (FAA) tools, concerns about the trustworthiness of these systems have become more prominent. This first workshop on "Towards Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis: Advancing Insights of Fairness, Explainability, and Safety (TrustFAA)" aims to bring together researchers who are investigating different challenges in relation to trustworthiness-such as interpretability, uncertainty, biases, and privacy-across various facial affect analysis tasks, including macro/ micro-expression recognition, facial action unit detection, other corresponding applications such as pain and depression detection, as well as human-robot interaction and collaboration. In alignment with FG2025's emphasis on ethics, as demonstrated by the inclusion of an Ethical Impact Statement requirement for this year's submissions, this workshop supports FG2025's efforts by encouraging research, discussion and dialogue on trustworthy FAA.

A Deep Learning Approach for Facial Attribute Manipulation and Reconstruction in Surveillance and Reconnaissance

Surveillance systems play a critical role in security and reconnaissance, but their performance is often compromised by low-quality images and videos, leading to reduced accuracy in face recognition. Additionally, existing AI-based facial analysis models suffer from biases related to skin tone variations and partially occluded faces, further limiting their effectiveness in diverse real-world scenarios. These challenges are the results of data limitations and imbalances, where available training datasets lack sufficient diversity, resulting in unfair and unreliable facial recognition performance. To address these issues, we propose a data-driven platform that enhances surveillance capabilities by generating synthetic training data tailored to compensate for dataset biases. Our approach leverages deep learning-based facial attribute manipulation and reconstruction using autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create diverse and high-quality facial datasets. Additionally, our system integrates an image enhancement module, improving the clarity of low-resolution or occluded faces in surveillance footage. We evaluate our approach using the CelebA dataset, demonstrating that the proposed platform enhances both training data diversity and model fairness. This work contributes to reducing bias in AI-based facial analysis and improving surveillance accuracy in challenging environments, leading to fairer and more reliable security applications.

SocialDF: Benchmark Dataset and Detection Model for Mitigating Harmful Deepfake Content on Social Media Platforms

The rapid advancement of deep generative models has significantly improved the realism of synthetic media, presenting both opportunities and security challenges. While deepfake technology has valuable applications in entertainment and accessibility, it has emerged as a potent vector for misinformation campaigns, particularly on social media. Existing detection frameworks struggle to distinguish between benign and adversarially generated deepfakes engineered to manipulate public perception. To address this challenge, we introduce SocialDF, a curated dataset reflecting real-world deepfake challenges on social media platforms. This dataset encompasses high-fidelity deepfakes sourced from various online ecosystems, ensuring broad coverage of manipulative techniques. We propose a novel LLM-based multi-factor detection approach that combines facial recognition, automated speech transcription, and a multi-agent LLM pipeline to cross-verify audio-visual cues. Our methodology emphasizes robust, multi-modal verification techniques that incorporate linguistic, behavioral, and contextual analysis to effectively discern synthetic media from authentic content.

Using Vision Language Models to Detect Students' Academic Emotion through Facial Expressions

Students' academic emotions significantly influence their social behavior and learning performance. Traditional approaches to automatically and accurately analyze these emotions have predominantly relied on supervised machine learning algorithms. However, these models often struggle to generalize across different contexts, necessitating repeated cycles of data collection, annotation, and training. The emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers a promising alternative, enabling generalization across visual recognition tasks through zero-shot prompting without requiring fine-tuning. This study investigates the potential of VLMs to analyze students' academic emotions via facial expressions in an online learning environment. We employed two VLMs, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, to analyze 5,000 images depicting confused, distracted, happy, neutral, and tired expressions using zero-shot prompting. Preliminary results indicate that both models demonstrate moderate performance in academic facial expression recognition, with Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct outperforming Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct. Notably, both models excel in identifying students' happy emotions but fail to detect distracted behavior. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct exhibits relatively high performance in recognizing students' confused expressions, highlighting its potential for practical applications in identifying content that causes student confusion.

Inverting Black-Box Face Recognition Systems via Zero-Order Optimization in Eigenface Space

Reconstructing facial images from black-box recognition models poses a significant privacy threat. While many methods require access to embeddings, we address the more challenging scenario of model inversion using only similarity scores. This paper introduces DarkerBB, a novel approach that reconstructs color faces by performing zero-order optimization within a PCA-derived eigenface space. Despite this highly limited information, experiments on LFW, AgeDB-30, and CFP-FP benchmarks demonstrate that DarkerBB achieves state-of-the-art verification accuracies in the similarity-only setting, with competitive query efficiency.

Accuracy and Fairness of Facial Recognition Technology in Low-Quality Police Images: An Experiment With Synthetic Faces

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is increasingly used in criminal investigations, yet most evaluations of its accuracy rely on high-quality images, unlike those often encountered by law enforcement. This study examines how five common forms of image degradation--contrast, brightness, motion blur, pose shift, and resolution--affect FRT accuracy and fairness across demographic groups. Using synthetic faces generated by StyleGAN3 and labeled with FairFace, we simulate degraded images and evaluate performance using Deepface with ArcFace loss in 1:n identification tasks. We perform an experiment and find that false positive rates peak near baseline image quality, while false negatives increase as degradation intensifies--especially with blur and low resolution. Error rates are consistently higher for women and Black individuals, with Black females most affected. These disparities raise concerns about fairness and reliability when FRT is used in real-world investigative contexts. Nevertheless, even under the most challenging conditions and for the most affected subgroups, FRT accuracy remains substantially higher than that of many traditional forensic methods. This suggests that, if appropriately validated and regulated, FRT should be considered a valuable investigative tool. However, algorithmic accuracy alone is not sufficient: we must also evaluate how FRT is used in practice, including user-driven data manipulation. Such cases underscore the need for transparency and oversight in FRT deployment to ensure both fairness and forensic validity.

Facial Recognition Leveraging Generative Adversarial Networks

Face recognition performance based on deep learning heavily relies on large-scale training data, which is often difficult to acquire in practical applications. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a GAN-based data augmentation method with three key contributions: (1) a residual-embedded generator to alleviate gradient vanishing/exploding problems, (2) an Inception ResNet-V1 based FaceNet discriminator for improved adversarial training, and (3) an end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes data generation and recognition performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves stable training dynamics and significantly improves face recognition accuracy by 12.7% on the LFW benchmark compared to baseline methods, while maintaining good generalization capability with limited training samples.