Unaligned Image-to-Image Translation by Learning to Reweight

Shaoan Xie, Mingming Gong, Yanwu Xu, Kun Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 14174-14184

Unsupervised image-to-image translation aims at learning the mapping from the source to target domain without using paired images for training. An essential yet restrictive assumption for unsupervised image translation is that the two domains are aligned, e.g., for the selfie2anime task, the anime (selfie) domain must contain only anime (selfie) face images that can be translated to some images in the other domain. Collecting aligned domains can be laborious and needs lots of attention. In this paper, we consider the task of image translation between two unaligned domains, which may arise for various possible reasons. To solve this problem, we propose to select images based on importance reweighting and develop a method to learn the weights and perform translation simultaneously and automatically. We compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art image translation approaches and present qualitative and quantitative results on different tasks with unaligned domains. Extensive empirical evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed problem formulation and the superiority of our method.