FaRL for Facial Representation Learning

This repo hosts official implementation of our paper "General Facial Representation Learning in a Visual-Linguistic Manner".

Introduction

FaRL offers powerful pre-training transformer backbones for face analysis tasks. Its pre-training combines both the image-text contrastive learning and the masked image modeling.

After the pre-training, the image encoder can be utilized for various downstream face tasks.

Pre-trained Backbones

We offer different pre-trained transformer backbones as below.

Model Name	Data	Epoch	Link
FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep16 (used in paper)	LAION Face 20M	16	BLOB
FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep64	LAION Face 20M	64	BLOB

Setup Downstream Training

We run all downstream trainings on 8 NVIDIA GPUs (32G). Our code supports other GPU configurations, but we do not guarantee the resulting performances on them. Before setting up, install these packages:

• PyTorch 1.7.0
• MMCV-Full 1.3.14

Then, install the rest dependencies with pip install -r ./requirement.txt.

Please refer to ./DS_DATA.md to prepare the training and testing data for downstream tasks.

Download the pre-trained backbones into ./blob/checkpoint/. Now you can launch the downstream trainings & evaluations with following command template.

python -m blueprint.run \
  farl/experiments/{task}/{train_config_file}.yaml \
  --exp_name farl --blob_root ./blob

The repo has included some config files under ./farl/experiments/ that perform finetuning for face parsing and face alignment. For example, if you would like to launch a face parsing training on LaPa by finetuning our FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep16 pre-training, simply run with:

python -m blueprint.run \
  farl/experiments/face_parsing/train_lapa_farl-b-ep16_448_refinebb.yaml \
  --exp_name farl --blob_root ./blob

Or if you would like to launch a face alignment training on 300W by finetuning our FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep16 pre-training, you can simply run with:

python -m blueprint.run \
  farl/experiments/face_alignment/train_ibug300w_farl-b-ep16_448_refinebb.yaml \
  --exp_name farl --blob_root ./blob

It is also easy to create new config files for training and evaluation on your own. For example, you can customize your own face parsing task on CelebAMask-HQ by editing the values below (remember to remove the comments before running).

package: farl.experiments.face_parsing

class: blueprint.ml.DistributedGPURun
local_run:
  $PARSE('./trainers/celebm_farl.yaml', 
    cfg_file=FILE,
    train_data_ratio=None, # The data ratio used for training. None means using 100% training data; 0.1 means using only 10% training data.
    batch_size=5, # The local batch size on each GPU.
    model_type='base', # The size of the pre-trained backbone. Supports 'base', 'large' or 'huge'.
    model_path=BLOB('checkpoint/FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep16.pth'), # The path to the pre-trained backbone.
    input_resolution=448, # The input image resolution, e.g 224, 448. 
    head_channel=768, # The channels of the head.
    optimizer_name='refine_backbone', # The optimization method. Should be 'refine_backbone' or 'freeze_backbone'.
    enable_amp=False) # Whether to enable float16 in downstream training.

Performance

The following table illustrates the performances of our FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep16 pre-training, which is pre-trained with 16 epoches, both reported in the paper (Paper) and reproduced using this repo (Rep). There are small differences between their performances due to code refactorization.

Name	Task	Benchmark	Metric	Score (Paper/Rep)	Logs (Paper/Rep)
face_parsing/ train_celebm_farl-b-ep16-448_refinebb.yaml	Face Parsing	CelebAMask-HQ	F1-mean ⇑	89.56/89.65	Paper, Rep
face_parsing/ train_lapa_farl-b-ep16_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Parsing	LaPa	F1-mean ⇑	93.88/93.86	Paper, Rep
face_alignment/ train_aflw19_farl-b-ep16_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Alignment	AFLW-19 (Full)	NME_diag ⇓	0.943/0.943	Paper, Rep
face_alignment/ train_ibug300w_farl-b-ep16_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Alignment	300W (Full)	NME_inter-ocular ⇓	2.93/2.92	Paper, Rep
face_alignment/ train_wflw_farl-b-ep16_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Alignment	WFLW (Full)	NME_inter-ocular ⇓	3.96/3.98	Paper, Rep

Below we also report results of our new FaRL-Base-Patch16-LAIONFace20M-ep64, which is pre-trained with 64 epoches instead of 16 epoches as above, showing further improvements on most tasks.

Name	Task	Benchmark	Metric	Score	Logs
face_parsing/ train_celebm_farl-b-ep64-448_refinebb.yaml	Face Parsing	CelebAMask-HQ	F1-mean ⇑	89.57	Rep
face_parsing/ train_lapa_farl-b-ep64_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Parsing	LaPa	F1-mean ⇑	94.04	Rep
face_alignment/ train_aflw19_farl-b-ep64_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Alignment	AFLW-19 (Full)	NME_diag ⇓	0.938	Rep
face_alignment/ train_ibug300w_farl-b-ep64_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Alignment	300W (Full)	NME_inter-ocular ⇓	2.88	Rep
face_alignment/ train_wflw_farl-b-ep64_448_refinebb.yaml	Face Alignment	WFLW (Full)	NME_inter-ocular ⇓	3.88	Rep

Contact

For help or issues concerning the code and the released models, feel free to submit a GitHub issue, or contact Hao Yang (haya@microsoft.com).

Citation

If you find our work helpful, please consider citing

@article{zheng2021farl,
  title={General Facial Representation Learning in a Visual-Linguistic Manner},
  author={Zheng, Yinglin and Yang, Hao and Zhang, Ting and Bao, Jianmin and Chen, Dongdong and Huang, Yangyu and Yuan, Lu and Chen, Dong and Zeng, Ming and Wen, Fang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.03109},
  year={2021}
}

Trademarks

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