Abstract To narrow the inherent sensing gap in heterogeneous face recognition (HFR), recent methods have resorted to generative models and explored the “recognition via generation” framework. Even though, it remains a very challenging task to synthesize photo-realistic visible faces (VIS) from near-infrared (NIR) images especially when paired training data are unavailable. We present an approach to avert the data misalignment problem and faithfully preserve pose, expression and identity information during cross-spectral face hallucination. At the pixel level, we introduce an unsupervised attention mechanism to warping that is jointly learned with the generator to derive pixelwise correspondence from unaligned data. At the image level, an auxiliary generator is employed to facilitate the learning of mapping from NIR to VIS domain. At the domain level, we first apply the mutual information constraint to explicitly measure the correlation between domains and thus bene- fit synthesis. Extensive experiments on three heterogeneous face datasets demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms current state-of-the-art HFR methods but also produce visually appealing results at a high resolution (256×256).