Content-Based Search for Deep Generative Models

The growing proliferation of pretrained generative models has made it infeasible for a user to be fully cognizant of every model in existence. To address this need, we introduce the task of content-based model search: given a query and a large set of generative models, find the models that best match the query. Because each generative model produces a distribution of images, we formulate the search problem as an optimization to maximize the probability of generating a query match given a model. We develop approximations to make this problem tractable when the query is an image, a sketch, a text description, another generative model, or a combination of the above. We benchmark our method in both accuracy and speed over a set of generative models. We demonstrate that our model search retrieves suitable models for image editing and reconstruction, few-shot transfer learning, and latent space interpolation. Finally, we deploy our search algorithm to our online generative model-sharing platform at https://modelverse.cs.cmu.edu.