Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks for High-Quality Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation has been made much progress with embracing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it's still very challenging for translation tasks that require high quality, especially at high-resolution and photorealism. In this paper, we present Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks (DRPAN) for high-quality image-to-image translation. We decompose the procedure of image-to-image translation task into three iterated steps, first is to generate an image with global structure but some local artifacts (via GAN), second is using our DRPnet to propose the most fake region from the generated image, and third is to implement "image inpainting" on the most fake region for more realistic result through a reviser, so that the system (DRPAN) can be gradually optimized to synthesize images with more attention on the most artifact local part. Experiments on a variety of image-to-image translation tasks and datasets validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts for producing high-quality translation results in terms of both human perceptual studies and automatic quantitative measures.Comment: ECCV 201

Compatibility Family Learning for Item Recommendation and Generation

Compatibility between items, such as clothes and shoes, is a major factor among customer's purchasing decisions. However, learning "compatibility" is challenging due to (1) broader notions of compatibility than those of similarity, (2) the asymmetric nature of compatibility, and (3) only a small set of compatible and incompatible items are observed. We propose an end-to-end trainable system to embed each item into a latent vector and project a query item into K compatible prototypes in the same space. These prototypes reflect the broad notions of compatibility. We refer to both the embedding and prototypes as "Compatibility Family". In our learned space, we introduce a novel Projected Compatibility Distance (PCD) function which is differentiable and ensures diversity by aiming for at least one prototype to be close to a compatible item, whereas none of the prototypes are close to an incompatible item. We evaluate our system on a toy dataset, two Amazon product datasets, and Polyvore outfit dataset. Our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we show that we can visualize the candidate compatible prototypes using a Metric-regularized Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (MrCGAN), where the input is a projected prototype and the output is a generated image of a compatible item. We ask human evaluators to judge the relative compatibility between our generated images and images generated by CGANs conditioned directly on query items. Our generated images are significantly preferred, with roughly twice the number of votes as others.Comment: 9 pages, accepted to AAAI 201

SketchyGAN: Towards Diverse and Realistic Sketch to Image Synthesis

Synthesizing realistic images from human drawn sketches is a challenging problem in computer graphics and vision. Existing approaches either need exact edge maps, or rely on retrieval of existing photographs. In this work, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approach that synthesizes plausible images from 50 categories including motorcycles, horses and couches. We demonstrate a data augmentation technique for sketches which is fully automatic, and we show that the augmented data is helpful to our task. We introduce a new network building block suitable for both the generator and discriminator which improves the information flow by injecting the input image at multiple scales. Compared to state-of-the-art image translation methods, our approach generates more realistic images and achieves significantly higher Inception Scores.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

SGAN: An Alternative Training of Generative Adversarial Networks

The Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated impressive performance for data synthesis, and are now used in a wide range of computer vision tasks. In spite of this success, they gained a reputation for being difficult to train, what results in a time-consuming and human-involved development process to use them. We consider an alternative training process, named SGAN, in which several adversarial "local" pairs of networks are trained independently so that a "global" supervising pair of networks can be trained against them. The goal is to train the global pair with the corresponding ensemble opponent for improved performances in terms of mode coverage. This approach aims at increasing the chances that learning will not stop for the global pair, preventing both to be trapped in an unsatisfactory local minimum, or to face oscillations often observed in practice. To guarantee the latter, the global pair never affects the local ones. The rules of SGAN training are thus as follows: the global generator and discriminator are trained using the local discriminators and generators, respectively, whereas the local networks are trained with their fixed local opponent. Experimental results on both toy and real-world problems demonstrate that this approach outperforms standard training in terms of better mitigating mode collapse, stability while converging and that it surprisingly, increases the convergence speed as well