A Large-scale Evaluation of Text-guided Models for Facial Editing

Text-driven 3D face generation and editing remains challenging due to the difficulty of translating long-form descriptions into fine-grained facial geometry. Existing methods primarily align global textual semantics with facial structures but often struggle to capture subtle local deformations, such as eyebrow tension, cheek contraction, and asymmetric mouth motions, resulting in limited geometric fidelity and editing precision. To facilitate fine-grained text-driven facial modeling, we first construct FaME-G2E, a large-scale multimodal dataset containing detailed text--mesh annotations and paired text--blendshape samples for unified 3D facial generation and editing. Based on this dataset, we propose RAGMesh, a retrieval-augmented framework that leverages text-correlated geometric priors to improve high-fidelity facial synthesis and editing. Specifically, the Multi-Scale Retrieval Fusion (MSRF) module retrieves semantically consistent global and regional facial priors and fuses them in the blendshape space, suppressing conflicting local deformations while preserving coherent deformation patterns. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive RAG-guided Supervision (AdaRAGS), a region-aware constraint that explicitly aligns textual semantics with corresponding facial regions, enhancing regional controllability and editing accuracy. Extensive experiments on FaME-G2E demonstrate that RAGMesh achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in local geometric accuracy, text-guided controllability, regional editing precision, and inference efficiency. Video demo is available at https://youtu.be/Yr0_XkpWcNk, and the source code and dataset will be released upon paper acceptance.

Facial expression image editing requires fine-grained control to strictly preserve human identity and background while precisely manipulating expression. However, existing editing benchmarks primarily focus on general scenarios, lacking high-quality facial images and corresponding editing instructions. Furthermore, current evaluation metrics exhibit systemic biases in this task, often favoring lazy editing or overfit editing. To bridge these gaps, we propose FED-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring rigorous testing and an accurate evaluation suite. First, we carefully construct a benchmark of 747 triplets through a cascaded and scalable pipeline, each comprising an original image, an editing instruction, and a ground-truth image for precise evaluation. Second, we introduce FED-Score, a cross-granularity evaluation protocol that disentangles assessment into three dimensions: Alignment for verifying instruction following, Fidelity for testing image quality and identity preservation, and Relative Expression Gain for quantifying the magnitude of expression changes, effectively mitigating the aforementioned evaluation biases. Third, we benchmark 18 image editing models, revealing that current approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve high fidelity and accurate expression manipulation, with fine-grained instruction following identified as the primary bottleneck. Finally, leveraging the scalable characteristic of introduced benchmark engine, we provide a 20k+ in-the-wild facial training set and demonstrate its effectiveness by fine-tuning a baseline model that achieves significant performance gains. Our benchmark and related code will be made publicly open soon.

Generating and editing a person's face demands high precision, as even minor modifications can significantly alter a subject's perceived identity. Current personalization and editing methods built on general-purpose text-to-image models, however, often lack the precision required for fine-grained facial edits. We present a method for fine-grained identity tuning in text-to-image personalization models. Unlike standard image editing, which operates on a given image, identity tuning modifies the latent representation of a specific identity, enabling the generation of diverse images that consistently depict the same edited identity. To enable fine-grained latent identity tuning, we explore the latent space of a pre-trained, frozen encoder for text-to-image personalization. Our approach requires no additional training. Instead, it leverages the existing architecture of a frozen encoder to uncover latent semantic directions. This space consists of a set of latent tokens that play distinct roles in capturing different aspects of an identity and often correspond to specific spatial or semantic facial regions. We show that meaningful directions can be identified within this space and within subspaces defined by selected tokens, enabling localized, fine-grained, and semantically coherent edits. We validate our approach through qualitative and quantitative experiments that demonstrate diverse localized facial edits while preserving cross-image identity consistency. Project page at: https://garibida.github.io/IdentityTuning/