Learning Style Subspaces for Controllable Unpaired Domain Translation

Gaurav Bhatt, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 4220-4229

The unpaired domain-to-domain translation aims to learn inter-domain relationships between diverse modalities without relying on paired data, which can help complex structure prediction tasks such as age transformation, where it is challenging to attain paired samples. A common approach used by most current methods is to factorize the data into a domain-invariant content space and a domain-specific style space. In this work, we argue that the style space can be further decomposed into smaller subspaces. Learning these style subspaces has two-fold advantages: (i) it allows more robustness and reliability in the generation of images in unpaired domain translation; and (ii) it allows better control and thereby interpolating the latent space, which can be helpful in complex translation tasks involving multiple domains. To achieve this decomposition, we propose a novel scalable approach to partition the latent space into style subspaces. We also propose a new evaluation metric that quantifies the controllable generation capability of domain translation methods. We compare our proposed method with several strong baselines on standard domain translation tasks such as gender translation (male-to-female and female-to-male), age transformation, reference-guided image synthesis, multi-domain image translation, and multi-attribute domain translation on celebA-HQ and AFHQ datasets. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain translation tasks while outperforming all the baselines on controllable generation tasks.