IConFace: Identity-Structure Asymmetric Conditioning for Unified Reference-Aware Face Restoration

Project / arXiv / Code

Abstract: Blind face restoration is challenging under severe degradation because identity-critical details may be missing from the degraded input. Same-identity references can reduce this ambiguity, but mismatched pose, expression, illumination, age, makeup, or local facial states may cause overuse of reference appearance. IConFace addresses this with a unified reference-aware and no-reference framework based on identity-structure asymmetric conditioning. It distills references into a norm-weighted global AdaFace identity anchor for image-only modulation, reinforces the degraded image as the spatial structure anchor through low-rank residuals and block-wise degraded cross-attention, and uses a two-route memory design. A single checkpoint can use references when available and fall back to no-reference restoration when absent.