English

CA-IDD: Cross-Attention Guided Identity-Conditional Diffusion for Identity-Consistent Face Swapping

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-28 v1

Abstract

Face swapping aims to optimize realistic facial image generation by leveraging the identity of a source face onto a target face while preserving pose, expression, and context. However, existing methods, especially GAN-based methods, often struggle to balance identity preservation and visual realism due to limited controllability and mode collapse. In this paper, we introduce CA-IDD (Cross-Attention Guided Identity-Conditional Diffusion), the first diffusion-based face swapping approach that integrates multi-modal guidance comprising gaze, identity, and facial parsing through multi-scale cross-attention. Precomputed identity embeddings are incorporated into the denoising process via hierarchical attention layers, resulting in accurate and consistent identity transfer. To improve semantic coherence and visual quality, we use expert-guided supervision, with facial parsing and gaze-consistency modules. Unlike GAN-based or implicit-fusion methods, our diffusion framework provides stable training, robust generalization, and spatially adaptive identity alignment, allowing for fine-grained regional control across pose and expression variations. CA-IDD achieves an FID of 11.73, exceeding established baselines such as FaceShifter and MegaFS. Qualitative results also reveal improved identity retention across diverse poses, establishing CA-IDD as a strong foundation for future diffusion-based face editing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24493,
  title  = {CA-IDD: Cross-Attention Guided Identity-Conditional Diffusion for Identity-Consistent Face Swapping},
  author = {Md Shohel Rana and Tanoy Debnath},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24493},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:37:16.607Z