Efficient Fine-tuning Strategies for Enhancing Face Recognition Performance in Challenging Scenarios

Face recognition plays a crucial role in human life, prompting numerous excellent research efforts. However, face recognition in real-world applications presents various scenarios such as occluded, overexposed and near-infrared face recognition. Due to domain discrepancy and a lack of large-scale training data, effectively transferring pre-trained face recognition models to these scenarios has become a challenge. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have shown great potential in natural language processing tasks, but their effectiveness in computer vision tasks, especially in face recognition tasks, remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Data-Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (DPEFT) approach for the face recognition tasks, encompassing two kinds of fine-tuning strategies. With these strategies, the DPEFT method requires only an additional 2.7% learnable parameters and 20% of the training data during the training phase to achieve competitive results. Moreover, by further integrating the concept of structural re-parameterization, our approach maintains the same model architecture and parameters as the pre-trained model during inference. Extensive experimental results on both holistic and occluded face datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to or better than the fully fine-tuning methods, and significantly lower training costs. Our DPEFT enables the pre-trained face recognition model to adapt efficiently and effectively to a variety of scenarios, indicating its potential in practical applications.