Through a large-scale study over diverse face images, we show that facial attribute editing using modern generative AI models can severely degrade automated face recognition systems. This degradation persists even with identity-preserving generative models. To mitigate this issue, we propose two novel techniques for local and global attribute editing. We empirically ablate twenty-six facial semantic, demographic and expression-based attributes that have been edited using state-of-the-art generative models, and evaluate them using ArcFace and AdaFace matchers on CelebA, CelebAMaskHQ and LFW datasets. Finally, we use LLaVA, an emerging visual question-answering framework for attribute prediction to validate our editing techniques. Our methods outperform the current state-of-the-art at facial editing (BLIP, InstantID) while improving identity retention by a significant extent.
@article{arxiv.2403.08092,
title = {Mitigating the Impact of Attribute Editing on Face Recognition},
author = {Sudipta Banerjee and Sai Pranaswi Mullangi and Shruti Wagle and Chinmay Hegde and Nasir Memon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.08092},
year = {2024}
}