Fantastic Style Channels and Where To Find Them: A Submodular Framework for Discovering Diverse Directions in GANs

Enis Simsar, Umut Kocasari, Ezgi Gülperi Er, Pinar Yanardag; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 4731-4740

The discovery of interpretable directions in the latent spaces of pre-trained GAN models has recently become a popular topic. In particular, StyleGAN2 has enabled various image generation and manipulation tasks due to its rich and disentangled latent spaces. However, the discovery of such directions is typically made either in a supervised manner, which requires annotated data for each desired manipulation, or in an unsupervised manner, which requires a manual effort to identify the directions. As a result, existing work typically finds only a handful of directions in which controllable edits can be made. In this study, we design a novel submodular framework that finds the most representative and diverse subset of directions in the latent space of StyleGAN2. Our approach takes advantage of the latent space of channel-wise style parameters, so-called stylespace, in which we cluster channels that perform similar manipulations into groups. Our framework promotes diversity by using the notion of clusters and can be efficiently solved with a greedy optimization scheme. We evaluate our framework with qualitative and quantitative experiments and show that our method finds more diverse and disentangled directions.