Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) learn abstract features to perform object classification, but understanding these features remains challenging due to difficult-to-interpret results or high computational costs. We propose an automatic method to visualize and systematically analyze learned features in CNNs. Specifically, we introduce a linking network that maps the penultimate layer of a pre-trained classifier to the latent space of a generative model (StyleGAN-XL), thereby enabling an interpretable, human-friendly visualization of the classifier's representations. Our findings indicate a congruent semantic order in both spaces, enabling a direct linear mapping between them. Training the linking network is computationally inexpensive and decoupled from training both the GAN and the classifier. We introduce an automatic pipeline that utilizes such GAN-based visualizations to quantify learned representations by analyzing activation changes in the classifier in the image domain. This quantification allows us to systematically study the learned representations in several thousand units simultaneously and to extract and visualize units selective for specific semantic concepts. Further, we illustrate how our method can be used to quantify and interpret the classifier's decision boundary using counterfactual examples. Overall, our method offers systematic and objective perspectives on learned abstract representations in CNNs. https://github.com/kaschube-lab/LinkingInStyle.git
This paper proposes a method that combines the style transfer technique and the learned descriptor to enhance the matching performances of underwater sonar images. In the field of underwater vision, sonar is currently the most effective long-distance detection sensor, it has excellent performances in map building and target search tasks. However, the traditional image matching algorithms are all developed based on optical images. In order to solve this contradiction, the style transfer method is used to convert the sonar images into optical styles, and at the same time, the learned descriptor …
MuseumMaker: Continual Style Customization without Catastrophic Forgetting
State Key Laboratory of Robotics, the Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院机器人与智能制造研究院机器人国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学自动化科学与工程学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Salesforce AI Research（Salesforce AI研究部门）
Style analysis of artwork in computer vision predominantly focuses on achieving results in target image generation through optimizing understanding of low level style characteristics such as brush strokes. However, fundamentally different techniques are required to computationally understand and control qualities of art which incorporate higher level style characteristics. We study style representations learned by neural network architectures incorporating these higher level characteristics. We find variation in learned style features from incorporating triplets annotated by art historians as …
DyArtbank: Diverse Artistic Style Transfer via Pre-trained Stable Diffusion and Dynamic Style Prompt Artbank
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
Many methods have been proposed to solve the domain adaptation problem recently. However, the success of them implicitly funds on the assumption that the information of domains are fully transferrable. If the assumption is not satisfied, the effect of negative transfer may degrade domain adaptation. In this paper, a better learning network has been proposed by considering three tasks - domain adaptation, disentangled representation, and style transfer simultaneously. Firstly, the learned features are disentangled into common parts and specific parts. The common parts represent the transferrabl…
We explore neural painters, a generative model for brushstrokes learned from a real non-differentiable and non-deterministic painting program. We show that when training an agent to "paint" images using brushstrokes, using a differentiable neural painter leads to much faster convergence. We propose a method for encouraging this agent to follow human-like strokes when reconstructing digits. We also explore the use of a neural painter as a differentiable image parameterization. By directly optimizing brushstrokes to activate neurons in a pre-trained convolutional network, we can directly visuali…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have established themselves as a prevalent approach to image synthesis. Of these, StyleGAN offers a fascinating case study, owing to its remarkable visual quality and an ability to support a large array of downstream tasks. This state-of-the-art report covers the StyleGAN architecture, and the ways it has been employed since its conception, while also analyzing its severe limitations. It aims to be of use for both newcomers, who wish to get a grasp of the field, and for more experienced readers that might benefit from seeing current research trends and ex…
Neural style transfer has drawn broad attention in recent years. However, most existing methods aim to explicitly model the transformation between different styles, and the learned model is thus not generalizable to new styles. We here attempt to separate the representations for styles and contents, and propose a generalized style transfer network consisting of style encoder, content encoder, mixer and decoder. The style encoder and content encoder are used to extract the style and content factors from the style reference images and content reference images, respectively. The mixer employs a b…
Recent techniques to solve photorealistic style transfer within deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) generally require intensive training from large-scale datasets, thus having limited applicability and poor generalization ability to unseen images or styles. To overcome this, we propose a novel framework, dubbed Deep Translation Prior (DTP), to accomplish photorealistic style transfer through test-time training on given input image pair with untrained networks, which learns an image pair-specific translation prior and thus yields better performance and generalization. Tailored for such te…
The latent code of the recent popular model StyleGAN has learned disentangled representations thanks to the multi-layer style-based generator. Embedding a given image back to the latent space of StyleGAN enables wide interesting semantic image editing applications. Although previous works are able to yield impressive inversion results based on an optimization framework, which however suffers from the efficiency issue. In this work, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework that consists of an efficient embedding network and an optimization-based iterator. On one hand, with the progre…
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学协同媒体网络创新中心）；Microsoft（微软）
Image style transfer has drawn broad attention in recent years. However, most existing methods aim to explicitly model the transformation between different styles, and the learned model is thus not generalizable to new styles. We here propose a unified style transfer framework for both character typeface transfer and neural style transfer tasks leveraging style and content separation. A key merit of such framework is its generalizability to new styles and contents. The overall framework consists of style encoder, content encoder, mixer and decoder. The style encoder and content encoder are use…
Disentangling factors of variation within data has become a very challenging problem for image generation tasks. Current frameworks for training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), learn to disentangle the representations of the data in an unsupervised fashion and capture the most significant factors of the data variations. However, these approaches ignore the principle of content and style disentanglement in image generation, which means their learned latent code may alter the content and style of the generated images at the same time. This paper describes the Style and Content Disentangl…
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；MILA, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学MILA）
In this paper, we present a method which combines the flexibility of the neural algorithm of artistic style with the speed of fast style transfer networks to allow real-time stylization using any content/style image pair. We build upon recent work leveraging conditional instance normalization for multi-style transfer networks by learning to predict the conditional instance normalization parameters directly from a style image. The model is successfully trained on a corpus of roughly 80,000 paintings and is able to generalize to paintings previously unobserved. We demonstrate that the learned em…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Style transfer describes the rendering of an image semantic content as different artistic styles. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as an effective approach in style transfer by adversarially training the generator to synthesize convincing counterfeits. However, traditional GAN suffers from the mode collapse issue, resulting in unstable training and making style transfer quality difficult to guarantee. In addition, the GAN generator is only compatible with one style, so a series of GANs must be trained to provide users with choices to transfer more than one kind of …
Structured representations such as keypoints are widely used in pose transfer, conditional image generation, animation, and 3D reconstruction. However, their supervised learning requires expensive annotation for each target domain. We propose a self-supervised method that learns to disentangle object structure from the appearance with a graph of 2D keypoints linked by straight edges. Both the keypoint location and their pairwise edge weights are learned, given only a collection of images depicting the same object class. The resulting graph is interpretable, for example, AutoLink recovers the h…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
A common strategy for improving model robustness is through data augmentations. Data augmentations encourage models to learn desired invariances, such as invariance to horizontal flipping or small changes in color. Recent work has shown that arbitrary style transfer can be used as a form of data augmentation to encourage invariance to textures by creating painting-like images from photographs. However, a stylized photograph is not quite the same as an artist-created painting. Artists depict perceptually meaningful cues in paintings so that humans can recognize salient components in scenes, an …
NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Chinese character style transfer is a very challenging problem because of the complexity of the glyph shapes or underlying structures and large numbers of existed characters, when comparing with English letters. Moreover, the handwriting of calligraphy masters has a more irregular stroke and is difficult to obtain in real-world scenarios. Recently, several GAN-based methods have been proposed for font synthesis, but some of them require numerous reference data and the other part of them have cumbersome preprocessing steps to divide the character into different parts to be learned and transferr…
We propose in this paper a new paradigm for facial video compression. We leverage the generative capacity of GANs such as StyleGAN to represent and compress a video, including intra and inter compression. Each frame is inverted in the latent space of StyleGAN, from which the optimal compression is learned. To do so, a diffeomorphic latent representation is learned using a normalizing flows model, where an entropy model can be optimized for image coding. In addition, we propose a new perceptual loss that is more efficient than other counterparts. Finally, an entropy model for video inter coding…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Visual Computing Research Center (VCC), College of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE)（视觉计算研究中心（VCC），计算机科学与软件工程学院）；Peking University（北京大学）
提出Abstraction in Style (AiS)框架，将结构抽象与视觉风格分离，通过中间抽象代理实现几何保真度放松，从而支持更广泛的非真实感风格迁移。
With the remarkable recent progress on learning deep generative models, it becomes increasingly interesting to develop models for controllable image synthesis from reconfigurable inputs. This paper focuses on a recent emerged task, layout-to-image, to learn generative models that are capable of synthesizing photo-realistic images from spatial layout (i.e., object bounding boxes configured in an image lattice) and style (i.e., structural and appearance variations encoded by latent vectors). This paper first proposes an intuitive paradigm for the task, layout-to-mask-to-image, to learn to unfold…
We propose a novel approach for multi-modal Image-to-image (I2I) translation. To tackle the one-to-many relationship between input and output domains, previous works use complex training objectives to learn a latent embedding, jointly with the generator, that models the variability of the output domain. In contrast, we directly model the style variability of images, independent of the image synthesis task. Specifically, we pre-train a generic style encoder using a novel proxy task to learn an embedding of images, from arbitrary domains, into a low-dimensional style latent space. The learned la…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Google（谷歌）
Transferring the style from one image onto another is a popular and widely studied task in computer vision. Yet, style transfer in the 3D setting remains a largely unexplored problem. To our knowledge, we propose the first learning-based approach for style transfer between 3D objects based on disentangled content and style representations. The proposed method can synthesize new 3D shapes both in the form of point clouds and meshes, combining the content and style of a source and target 3D model to generate a novel shape that resembles in style the target while retaining the source content. Fur…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；EIT（欧洲创新与技术学院）
This paper addresses the unsupervised learning of content-style decomposed representation. We first give a definition of style and then model the content-style representation as a token-level bipartite graph. An unsupervised framework, named Retriever, is proposed to learn such representations. First, a cross-attention module is employed to retrieve permutation invariant (P.I.) information, defined as style, from the input data. Second, a vector quantization (VQ) module is used, together with man-induced constraints, to produce interpretable content tokens. Last, an innovative link attention m…
With the development of the convolutional neural network, image style transfer has drawn increasing attention. However, most existing approaches adopt a global feature transformation to transfer style patterns into content images (e.g., AdaIN and WCT). Such a design usually destroys the spatial information of the input images and fails to transfer fine-grained style patterns into style transfer results. To solve this problem, we propose a novel STyle TRansformer (STTR) network which breaks both content and style images into visual tokens to achieve a fine-grained style transformation. Specific…
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（浦项科技大学）
We present a novel method of learning style-agnostic representation using both style transfer and adversarial learning in the reinforcement learning framework. The style, here, refers to task-irrelevant details such as the color of the background in the images, where generalizing the learned policy across environments with different styles is still a challenge. Focusing on learning style-agnostic representations, our method trains the actor with diverse image styles generated from an inherent adversarial style perturbation generator, which plays a min-max game between the actor and the generat…
EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Palo Alto Research Center（帕洛阿尔托研究中心）
While the quality of GAN image synthesis has improved tremendously in recent years, our ability to control and condition the output is still limited. Focusing on StyleGAN, we introduce a simple and effective method for making local, semantically-aware edits to a target output image. This is accomplished by borrowing elements from a source image, also a GAN output, via a novel manipulation of style vectors. Our method requires neither supervision from an external model, nor involves complex spatial morphing operations. Instead, it relies on the emergent disentanglement of semantic objects that …
Extensive research in neural style transfer methods has shown that the correlation between features extracted by a pre-trained VGG network has a remarkable ability to capture the visual style of an image. Surprisingly, however, this stylization quality is not robust and often degrades significantly when applied to features from more advanced and lightweight networks, such as those in the ResNet family. By performing extensive experiments with different network architectures, we find that residual connections, which represent the main architectural difference between VGG and ResNet, produce fea…
Existing deep neural networks for histopathology image synthesis cannot generate image styles that align with different organs, and cannot produce accurate boundaries of clustered nuclei. To address these issues, we propose a style-guided instance-adaptive normalization (SIAN) approach to synthesize realistic color distributions and textures for histopathology images from different organs. SIAN contains four phases, semantization, stylization, instantiation, and modulation. The first two phases synthesize image semantics and styles by using semantic maps and learned image style vectors. The in…
Arbitrary style transfer is the task of synthesis of an image that has never been seen before, using two given images: content image and style image. The content image forms the structure, the basic geometric lines and shapes of the resulting image, while the style image sets the color and texture of the result. The word "arbitrary" in this context means the absence of any one pre-learned style. So, for example, convolutional neural networks capable of transferring a new style only after training or retraining on a new amount of data are not con-sidered to solve such a problem, while networks …
The diversity of painting styles represents a rich visual vocabulary for the construction of an image. The degree to which one may learn and parsimoniously capture this visual vocabulary measures our understanding of the higher level features of paintings, if not images in general. In this work we investigate the construction of a single, scalable deep network that can parsimoniously capture the artistic style of a diversity of paintings. We demonstrate that such a network generalizes across a diversity of artistic styles by reducing a painting to a point in an embedding space. Importantly, th…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Adobe（Adobe公司）
The style of an image plays a significant role in how it is viewed, but style has received little attention in computer vision research. We describe an approach to predicting style of images, and perform a thorough evaluation of different image features for these tasks. We find that features learned in a multi-layer network generally perform best -- even when trained with object class (not style) labels. Our large-scale learning methods results in the best published performance on an existing dataset of aesthetic ratings and photographic style annotations. We present two novel datasets: 80K Fl…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Analysis and recognition of driving styles are profoundly important to intelligent transportation and vehicle calibration. This paper presents a novel driving style analysis framework using the primitive driving patterns learned from naturalistic driving data. In order to achieve this, first, a Bayesian nonparametric learning method based on a hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) is introduced to extract primitive driving patterns from time series driving data without prior knowledge of the number of these patterns. In the Bayesian nonparametric approach, we utilize a hierarchical Dirichlet process…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；College of Charleston（查尔斯顿学院）
How does the machine classify styles in art? And how does it relate to art historians' methods for analyzing style? Several studies have shown the ability of the machine to learn and predict style categories, such as Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, etc., from images of paintings. This implies that the machine can learn an internal representation encoding discriminative features through its visual analysis. However, such a representation is not necessarily interpretable. We conducted a comprehensive study of several of the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks applied to the task …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Automatic color enhancement is aimed to adaptively adjust photos to expected styles and tones. For current learned methods in this field, global harmonious perception and local details are hard to be well-considered in a single model simultaneously. To address this problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework with non-local attention for color enhancement in this paper. Within our framework, we propose to divide enhancement process into channel-wise enhancement and pixel-wise refinement performed by two cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In channel-wise enhancement, our model pre…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
In this paper, we consider the problem of domain generalization in semantic segmentation, which aims to learn a robust model using only labeled synthetic (source) data. The model is expected to perform well on unseen real (target) domains. Our study finds that the image style variation can largely influence the model's performance and the style features can be well represented by the channel-wise mean and standard deviation of images. Inspired by this, we propose a novel adversarial style augmentation (AdvStyle) approach, which can dynamically generate hard stylized images during training and …
HKUST（香港科技大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Improving model's generalizability against domain shifts is crucial, especially for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Real-world domain styles can vary substantially due to environment changes and sensor noises, but deep models only know the training domain style. Such domain style gap impedes model generalization on diverse real-world domains. Our proposed Normalization Perturbation (NP) can effectively overcome this domain style overfitting problem. We observe that this problem is mainly caused by the biased distribution of low-level features learned in shallow CNN lay…
