Channel-Recurrent Autoencoding for Image Modeling

Despite recent successes in synthesizing faces and bedrooms, existing generative models struggle to capture more complex image types, potentially due to the oversimplification of their latent space constructions. To tackle this issue, building on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), we integrate recurrent connections across channels to both inference and generation steps, allowing the high-level features to be captured in global-to-local, coarse-to-fine manners. Combined with adversarial loss, our channel-recurrent VAE-GAN (crVAE-GAN) outperforms VAE-GAN in generating a diverse spectrum of high resolution images while maintaining the same level of computational efficacy. Our model produces interpretable and expressive latent representations to benefit downstream tasks such as image completion. Moreover, we propose two novel regularizations, namely the KL objective weighting scheme over time steps and mutual information maximization between transformed latent variables and the outputs, to enhance the training.Comment: Code: https://github.com/WendyShang/crVAE. Supplementary Materials: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shangw/wacv18_supplementary_material.pd

AgingMapGAN (AMGAN): High-Resolution Controllable Face Aging with Spatially-Aware Conditional GANs

Existing approaches and datasets for face aging produce results skewed towards the mean, with individual variations and expression wrinkles often invisible or overlooked in favor of global patterns such as the fattening of the face. Moreover, they offer little to no control over the way the faces are aged and can difficultly be scaled to large images, thus preventing their usage in many real-world applications. To address these limitations, we present an approach to change the appearance of a high-resolution image using ethnicity-specific aging information and weak spatial supervision to guide the aging process. We demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method in terms of quality, control, and how it can be used on high-definition images while limiting the computational overhead.Comment: Project page: https://despoisj.github.io/AgingMapGAN