Trading-off Mutual Information on Feature Aggregation for Face
  Recognition
Mohammad Akyash Ali Zafari Nasser M. Nasrabadi
Despite the advances in the field of Face Recognition (FR), the precision of
these methods is not yet sufficient. To improve the FR performance, this paper
proposes a technique to aggregate the outputs of two state-of-the-art (SOTA)
deep FR models, namely ArcFace and AdaFace. In our approach, we leverage the
transformer attention mechanism to exploit the relationship between different
parts of two feature maps. By doing so, we aim to enhance the overall
discriminative power of the FR system. One of the challenges in feature
aggregation is the effective modeling of both local and global dependencies.
Conventional transformers are known for their ability to capture long-range
dependencies, but they often struggle with modeling local dependencies
accurately. To address this limitation, we augment the self-attention mechanism
to capture both local and global dependencies effectively. This allows our
model to take advantage of the overlapping receptive fields present in
corresponding locations of the feature maps. However, fusing two feature maps
from different FR models might introduce redundancies to the face embedding.
Since these models often share identical backbone architectures, the resulting
feature maps may contain overlapping information, which can mislead the
training process. To overcome this problem, we leverage the principle of
Information Bottleneck to obtain a maximally informative facial representation.
This ensures that the aggregated features retain the most relevant and
discriminative information while minimizing redundant or misleading details. To
evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on
popular benchmarks and compared our results with state-of-the-art algorithms.
The consistent improvement we observed in these benchmarks demonstrates the
efficacy of our approach in enhancing FR performance.