From Cradle to Cane: A Two-Pass Framework for High-Fidelity Lifespan Face Aging

Tao Liu, Dafeng Zhang, Gengchen Li, Shizhuo Liu, yongqi song, Senmao Li, Shiqi Yang, Boqian Li, Kai Wang, Yaxing Wang

Keywords: diffusion models, face aging, facial age transformation

TL;DR: We propose Cradle2Cane, a novel two-pass diffusion-based face aging method that balances age accuracy and identity preservation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the CelebA test dataset with improved efficiency.

Abstract:

Face aging has become a crucial task in computer vision, with applications ranging from entertainment to healthcare. However, existing methods struggle with achieving a realistic and seamless transformation across the entire lifespan, especially when handling large age gaps or extreme head poses. The core challenge lies in balancing $age\ accuracy$ and $identity\ preservation$—what we refer to as the $Age\text{-}ID\ trade\text{-}off$. Most prior methods either prioritize age transformation at the expense of identity consistency or vice versa. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a $two\text{-}pass$ face aging framework, named $Cradle2Cane$, based on few-step text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. The first pass focuses on solving $age\ accuracy$ by introducing an adaptive noise injection ($AdaNI$) mechanism. This mechanism is guided by including prompt descriptions of age and gender for the given person as the textual condition.
Also, by adjusting the noise level, we can control the strength of aging while allowing more flexibility in transforming the face.
However, identity preservation is weakly ensured here to facilitate stronger age transformations.
In the second pass, we enhance $identity\ preservation$ while maintaining age-specific features by conditioning the model on two identity-aware embeddings ($IDEmb$): $SVR\text{-}ArcFace$ and $Rotate\text{-}CLIP$. This pass allows for denoising the transformed image from the first pass, ensuring stronger identity preservation without compromising the aging accuracy.
Both passes are $jointly\ trained\ in\ an\ end\text{-}to\text{-}end\ way\$. Extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ test dataset, evaluated through Face++ and Qwen-VL protocols, show that our $Cradle2Cane$ outperforms existing face aging methods in age accuracy and identity consistency.
Additionally, $Cradle2Cane$ demonstrates superior robustness when applied to in-the-wild human face images, where prior methods often fail. This significantly broadens its applicability to more diverse and unconstrained real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/byliutao/Cradle2Cane.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 5587