StyleGenes: Discrete and Efficient Latent Distributions for GANs

Evangelos Ntavelis, Mohamad Shahbazi, Radu Timofte, Martin Danelljan, Luc Van Gool

Keywords: generative adversarial networks, discrete sampling, unconditional training, conditional generation

Abstract: Networks (GANs). Instead of drawing latent vectors from a continuous prior, we sample from a finite set of learnable latents. However, a direct parametrization of such a distribution leads to an intractable linear increase in memory in order to ensure sufficient sample diversity. We address this key issue by taking inspiration from the encoding of information in biological organisms. Instead of learning a separate latent vector for each sample, we split the latent space into a set of genes. For each gene, we train a small bank of gene variants. Thus, by independently sampling a variant for each gene and combining them into the final latent vector, our approach can represent a vast number of unique latent samples from a compact set of learnable parameters. Interestingly, our gene-inspired latent encoding allows for new and intuitive approaches to manipulation, latent-space exploration, and classifier-based conditional sampling, while preserving state-of-the-art photo-realism.

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