Everything is There in Latent Space: Attribute Editing and Attribute Style Manipulation by StyleGAN Latent Space Exploration

TL;DR

FLAME is a minimal supervision framework that enables precise, diverse, and disentangled attribute editing and style manipulation in images generated by StyleGAN, using latent space directions and attribute style manifolds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel minimal supervision method for controlled attribute editing and a new task of attribute style manipulation using latent space manifolds.

Findings

FLAME achieves high-precision attribute editing with minimal supervision.

The method generates diverse attribute styles beyond training data.

FLAME outperforms previous methods in qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Abstract

Unconstrained Image generation with high realism is now possible using recent Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it is quite challenging to generate images with a given set of attributes. Recent methods use style-based GAN models to perform image editing by leveraging the semantic hierarchy present in the layers of the generator. We present Few-shot Latent-based Attribute Manipulation and Editing (FLAME), a simple yet effective framework to perform highly controlled image editing by latent space manipulation. Specifically, we estimate linear directions in the latent space (of a pre-trained StyleGAN) that controls semantic attributes in the generated image. In contrast to previous methods that either rely on large-scale attribute labeled datasets or attribute classifiers, FLAME uses minimal supervision of a few curated image pairs to estimate disentangled edit directions. FLAME can perform both individual and sequential edits with high precision on a diverse set of images while preserving identity. Further, we propose a novel task of Attribute Style Manipulation to generate diverse styles for attributes such as eyeglass and hair. We first encode a set of synthetic images of the same identity but having different attribute styles in the latent space to estimate an attribute style manifold. Sampling a new latent from this manifold will result in a new attribute style in the generated image. We propose a novel sampling method to sample latent from the manifold, enabling us to generate a diverse set of attribute styles beyond the styles present in the training set. FLAME can generate diverse attribute styles in a disentangled manner. We illustrate the superior performance of FLAME against previous image editing methods by extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons. FLAME also generalizes well on multiple datasets such as cars and churches.