Adversarial Learning of Disentangled and Generalizable Representations for Visual Attributes

Recently, a multitude of methods for image-to-image translation has demonstrated impressive results on problems such as multi-domain or multi-attribute transfer. The vast majority of such works leverages the strengths of adversarial learning in tandem with deep convolutional autoencoders to achieve realistic results by well-capturing the target data distribution. Nevertheless, the most prominent representatives of this class of methods do not facilitate semantic structure in the latent space, and usually rely on domain labels for test-time transfer. This leads to rigid models that are unable to capture the variance of each domain label. In this light, we propose a novel adversarial learning method that (i) facilitates latent structure by disentangling sources of variation based on a novel cost function and (ii) encourages learning generalizable, continuous and transferable latent codes that can be utilized for tasks such as unpaired multi-domain image transfer and synthesis, without requiring labelled test data. The resulting representations can be combined in arbitrary ways to generate novel hybrid imagery, as for example generating mixtures of identities. We demonstrate the merits of the proposed method by a set of qualitative and quantitative experiments on popular databases, where our method clearly outperforms other, state-of-the-art methods. Code for reproducing our results can be found at: https://github.com/james-oldfield/adv-attribute-disentanglement