---
license: apache-2.0
pipeline_tag: image-classification
tags:
- Face
- Face Recognition
- Biometrics
- MOE
- ViT
---

# FaceMoE: Mixture of Experts for Low-Resolution Face Recognition

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[**Project Page**](https://kartik-3004.github.io/FaceMoE/) **|** [**Paper (ArXiv)**](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.32040) **|** [**Code**](https://github.com/Kartik-3004/FaceMoE)


</div>

**ECCV 2026**  
**Authors:** Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel  
**Affiliation:** Johns Hopkins University

## Abstract

Low-resolution face recognition remains challenging due to severe degradations in probe images, domain differences between high-resolution gallery and low-resolution probe data, and catastrophic forgetting during low-resolution adaptation. FaceMoE introduces a transformer with Mixture-of-Experts feed-forward blocks and a top-k router that dynamically activates specialized experts for different semantic facial regions. This resolution-aware sparse routing improves feature extraction under degradation while preserving pretrained knowledge and scaling capacity efficiently.

Across eleven datasets (high-quality, mixed-quality, and low-resolution benchmarks), FaceMoE outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, including strong gains on BRIAR Protocol 3.1, IJB-S, and TinyFace.

<div  align="center">
<img src='./assets/briar_ijbs_results.png'>
</div>


## Motivation and Contributions

The motivation figure highlights three core LR-FR challenges: (1) degraded probe frames contain weak identity cues, making feature aggregation difficult; (2) a strong HR gallery vs LR probe domain gap changes which facial regions are discriminative; and (3) naive low-resolution fine-tuning can cause catastrophic forgetting.

FaceMoE addresses these challenges by introducing sparse expert FFNs, routing each token through top-k specialized experts, and improving adaptation to low-resolution data with minimal drop on high-quality and mixed-quality benchmarks.

<div  align="center">
<img src='./assets/intro.png'>
</div>

## FaceMoE Architecture

FaceMoE replaces the standard transformer FFN with multiple expert MLPs and a learnable top-k router. Tokens are sparsely routed to expert subsets, enabling resolution-aware feature extraction from different semantic facial regions. A composite objective with CosFace loss, router z-loss, and load-balancing loss stabilizes expert specialization. The reported effective configuration is **N = 3** experts with **k = 2** active experts per token.

<div  align="center">
<img src='./assets/archi.png'>
</div>


## Usage

You can download the weights using:

```python
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Finetuned Weights

hf_hub_download(repo_id="kartiknarayan/FaceMoE", filename="swin4m_exp_3_k_2_briar_full/model.pt", local_dir="./weights")
hf_hub_download(repo_id="kartiknarayan/FaceMoE", filename="swin4m_exp_3_k_2_tinyface_full/model.pt", local_dir="./weights")
```


## Citation

Coming soon ...

Check our GitHub repo for complete training and inference instructions: https://github.com/Kartik-3004/FaceMoE