UIFace: Unleashing Inherent Model Capabilities to Enhance Intra-Class Diversity in Synthetic Face Recognition

Face recognition (FR) stands as one of the most crucial applications in computer vision. The accuracy of FR models has significantly improved in recent years due to the availability of large-scale human face datasets. However, directly using these datasets can inevitably lead to privacy and legal problems. Generating synthetic data to train FR models is a feasible solution to circumvent these issues. While existing synthetic-based face recognition methods have made significant progress in generating identity-preserving images, they are severely plagued by context overfitting, resulting in a lack of intra-class diversity of generated images and poor face recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a framework to $\textbf{U}$nleash model $\textbf{I}$nherent capabilities to enhance intra-class diversity for synthetic face recognition, shorted as $\textbf{UIFace}$. Our framework first train a diffusion model that can perform denoising conditioned on either identity contexts or a learnable empty context. The former generates identity-preserving images but lacks variations, while the latter exploits the model's intrinsic ability to synthesize intra-class-diversified images but with random identities. Then we adopt a novel two-stage denoising strategy to fully leverage the strengths of both type of contexts, resulting in images that are diverse as well as identity-preserving. Moreover, an attention injection module is introduced to further augment the intra-class variations by utilizing attention maps from the empty context to guide the denoising process in ID-conditioned generation. Experiments show that our method significantly surpasses previous approaches with even less training data and half the size of synthetic dataset. More surprisingly, the proposed $\textbf{UIFace}$ even achieves comparable performance of FR models trained on real datasets when we increase the number of synthetic identities.