No. Alignment is done by every face verification method, and even the "new" 3d alignment done here is on par with other alignment methods in practice today. At

No. Alignment is done by every face verification method, and even the "new" 3d alignment done here is on par with other alignment methods in practice today. At their talk at CVPR, they made clear that the biggest factor in getting their numbers was having tons of training data and a high-capacity learning model. The paper even shows that if you replace their 3d alignment with a standard 2d affine alignment (something people were doing 15 years ago), you lose only 1.5% on LFW (table 2).