Spatial Steerability of GANs via Self-Supervision from Discriminator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised method that enhances the spatial controllability of GANs by encoding Gaussian heatmaps into the model, allowing intuitive scene layout edits without extra annotations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel self-supervised approach that aligns heatmaps with discriminator attention, enabling spatial editing and improving synthesis quality without additional annotations.

Findings

Enables spatial editing of various scenes and objects.

Improves the quality of generated images.

Supports intuitive, fine-grained scene manipulation.

Abstract

Generative models make huge progress to the photorealistic image synthesis in recent years. To enable human to steer the image generation process and customize the output, many works explore the interpretable dimensions of the latent space in GANs. Existing methods edit the attributes of the output image such as orientation or color scheme by varying the latent code along certain directions. However, these methods usually require additional human annotations for each pretrained model, and they mostly focus on editing global attributes. In this work, we propose a self-supervised approach to improve the spatial steerability of GANs without searching for steerable directions in the latent space or requiring extra annotations. Specifically, we design randomly sampled Gaussian heatmaps to be encoded into the intermediate layers of generative models as spatial inductive bias. Along with training the GAN model from scratch, these heatmaps are being aligned with the emerging attention of the GAN's discriminator in a self-supervised learning manner. During inference, users can interact with the spatial heatmaps in an intuitive manner, enabling them to edit the output image by adjusting the scene layout, moving, or removing objects. Moreover, we incorporate DragGAN into our framework, which facilitates fine-grained manipulation within a reasonable time and supports a coarse-to-fine editing process. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method not only enables spatial editing over human faces, animal faces, outdoor scenes, and complicated multi-object indoor scenes but also brings improvement in synthesis quality. Code, models, and demo video are available at https://genforce.github.io/SpatialGAN/.