Unsupervised Image Super-Resolution with an Indirect Supervised Path

The task of single image super-resolution (SISR) aims at reconstructing a high-resolution (HR) image from a low-resolution (LR) image. Although significant progress has been made by deep learning models, they are trained on synthetic paired data in a supervised way and do not perform well on real data. There are several attempts that directly apply unsupervised image translation models to address such a problem. However, unsupervised low-level vision problem poses more challenge on the accuracy of translation. In this work,we propose a novel framework which is composed of two stages: 1) unsupervised image translation between real LR images and synthetic LR images; 2) supervised super-resolution from approximated real LR images to HR images. It takes the synthetic LR images as a bridge and creates an indirect supervised path from real LR images to HR images. Any existed deep learning based image super-resolution model can be integrated into the second stage of the proposed framework for further improvement. In addition it shows great flexibility in balancing between distortion and perceptual quality under unsupervised setting. The proposed method is evaluated on both NTIRE 2017 and 2018 challenge datasets and achieves favorable performance against supervised methods

Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks

Unsupervised image-to-image translation aims at learning a joint distribution of images in different domains by using images from the marginal distributions in individual domains. Since there exists an infinite set of joint distributions that can arrive the given marginal distributions, one could infer nothing about the joint distribution from the marginal distributions without additional assumptions. To address the problem, we make a shared-latent space assumption and propose an unsupervised image-to-image translation framework based on Coupled GANs. We compare the proposed framework with competing approaches and present high quality image translation results on various challenging unsupervised image translation tasks, including street scene image translation, animal image translation, and face image translation. We also apply the proposed framework to domain adaptation and achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Code and additional results are available in https://github.com/mingyuliutw/unit .Comment: NIPS 2017, 11 pages, 6 figure

COCO-FUNIT: Few-Shot Unsupervised Image Translation with a Content Conditioned Style Encoder

Unsupervised image-to-image translation intends to learn a mapping of an image in a given domain to an analogous image in a different domain, without explicit supervision of the mapping. Few-shot unsupervised image-to-image translation further attempts to generalize the model to an unseen domain by leveraging example images of the unseen domain provided at inference time. While remarkably successful, existing few-shot image-to-image translation models find it difficult to preserve the structure of the input image while emulating the appearance of the unseen domain, which we refer to as the content loss problem. This is particularly severe when the poses of the objects in the input and example images are very different. To address the issue, we propose a new few-shot image translation model, COCO-FUNIT, which computes the style embedding of the example images conditioned on the input image and a new module called the constant style bias. Through extensive experimental validations with comparison to the state-of-the-art, our model shows effectiveness in addressing the content loss problem. For code and pretrained models, please check out https://nvlabs.github.io/COCO-FUNIT/ .Comment: The paper will be presented at the EUROPEAN Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 202

Non-Adversarial Image Synthesis with Generative Latent Nearest Neighbors

Unconditional image generation has recently been dominated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). GAN methods train a generator which regresses images from random noise vectors, as well as a discriminator that attempts to differentiate between the generated images and a training set of real images. GANs have shown amazing results at generating realistic looking images. Despite their success, GANs suffer from critical drawbacks including: unstable training and mode-dropping. The weaknesses in GANs have motivated research into alternatives including: variational auto-encoders (VAEs), latent embedding learning methods (e.g. GLO) and nearest-neighbor based implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE). Unfortunately at the moment, GANs still significantly outperform the alternative methods for image generation. In this work, we present a novel method - Generative Latent Nearest Neighbors (GLANN) - for training generative models without adversarial training. GLANN combines the strengths of IMLE and GLO in a way that overcomes the main drawbacks of each method. Consequently, GLANN generates images that are far better than GLO and IMLE. Our method does not suffer from mode collapse which plagues GAN training and is much more stable. Qualitative results show that GLANN outperforms a baseline consisting of 800 GANs and VAEs on commonly used datasets. Our models are also shown to be effective for training truly non-adversarial unsupervised image translation

XOGAN: One-to-Many Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation aims at learning the relationship between samples from two image domains without supervised pair information. The relationship between two domain images can be one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many. In this paper, we study the one-to-many unsupervised image translation problem in which an input sample from one domain can correspond to multiple samples in the other domain. To learn the complex relationship between the two domains, we introduce an additional variable to control the variations in our one-to-many mapping. A generative model with an XO-structure, called the XOGAN, is proposed to learn the cross domain relationship among the two domains and the ad- ditional variables. Not only can we learn to translate between the two image domains, we can also handle the translated images with additional variations. Experiments are performed on unpaired image generation tasks, including edges-to-objects translation and facial image translation. We show that the proposed XOGAN model can generate plausible images and control variations, such as color and texture, of the generated images. Moreover, while state-of-the-art unpaired image generation algorithms tend to generate images with monotonous colors, XOGAN can generate more diverse results

Twin-GAN -- Unpaired Cross-Domain Image Translation with Weight-Sharing GANs

We present a framework for translating unlabeled images from one domain into analog images in another domain. We employ a progressively growing skip-connected encoder-generator structure and train it with a GAN loss for realistic output, a cycle consistency loss for maintaining same-domain translation identity, and a semantic consistency loss that encourages the network to keep the input semantic features in the output. We apply our framework on the task of translating face images, and show that it is capable of learning semantic mappings for face images with no supervised one-to-one image mapping

Unsupervised Multi-Domain Image Translation with Domain-Specific Encoders/Decoders

Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation achieves spectacularly advanced developments nowadays. However, recent approaches mainly focus on one model with two domains, which may face heavy burdens with large cost of $O(n^2)$ training time and model parameters, under such a requirement that $n$ domains are freely transferred to each other in a general setting. To address this problem, we propose a novel and unified framework named Domain-Bank, which consists of a global shared auto-encoder and $n$ domain-specific encoders/decoders, assuming that a universal shared-latent sapce can be projected. Thus, we yield $O(n)$ complexity in model parameters along with a huge reduction of the time budgets. Besides the high efficiency, we show the comparable (or even better) image translation results over state-of-the-arts on various challenging unsupervised image translation tasks, including face image translation, fashion-clothes translation and painting style translation. We also apply the proposed framework to domain adaptation and achieve state-of-the-art performance on digit benchmark datasets. Further, thanks to the explicit representation of the domain-specific decoders as well as the universal shared-latent space, it also enables us to conduct incremental learning to add a new domain encoder/decoder. Linear combination of different domains' representations is also obtained by fusing the corresponding decoders

SPatchGAN: A Statistical Feature Based Discriminator for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

For unsupervised image-to-image translation, we propose a discriminator architecture which focuses on the statistical features instead of individual patches. The network is stabilized by distribution matching of key statistical features at multiple scales. Unlike the existing methods which impose more and more constraints on the generator, our method facilitates the shape deformation and enhances the fine details with a greatly simplified framework. We show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models in various challenging applications including selfie-to-anime, male-to-female and glasses removal. The code will be made publicly available

Neural Hair Rendering

In this paper, we propose a generic neural-based hair rendering pipeline that can synthesize photo-realistic images from virtual 3D hair models. Unlike existing supervised translation methods that require model-level similarity to preserve consistent structure representation for both real images and fake renderings, our method adopts an unsupervised solution to work on arbitrary hair models. The key component of our method is a shared latent space to encode appearance-invariant structure information of both domains, which generates realistic renderings conditioned by extra appearance inputs. This is achieved by domain-specific pre-disentangled structure representation, partially shared domain encoder layers and a structure discriminator. We also propose a simple yet effective temporal conditioning method to enforce consistency for video sequence generation. We demonstrate the superiority of our method by testing it on a large number of portraits and comparing it with alternative baselines and state-of-the-art unsupervised image translation methods.Comment: ECCV 202

The Information Autoencoding Family: A Lagrangian Perspective on Latent Variable Generative Models

A large number of objectives have been proposed to train latent variable generative models. We show that many of them are Lagrangian dual functions of the same primal optimization problem. The primal problem optimizes the mutual information between latent and visible variables, subject to the constraints of accurately modeling the data distribution and performing correct amortized inference. By choosing to maximize or minimize mutual information, and choosing different Lagrange multipliers, we obtain different objectives including InfoGAN, ALI/BiGAN, ALICE, CycleGAN, beta-VAE, adversarial autoencoders, AVB, AS-VAE and InfoVAE. Based on this observation, we provide an exhaustive characterization of the statistical and computational trade-offs made by all the training objectives in this class of Lagrangian duals. Next, we propose a dual optimization method where we optimize model parameters as well as the Lagrange multipliers. This method achieves Pareto optimal solutions in terms of optimizing information and satisfying the constraints