In this paper, we aim at solving the multi-domain image-to-image translation problem with a unified model in an unsupervised manner. The most successful work in this area refers to StarGAN, which works well in tasks like face attribute modulation. However, StarGAN is unable to match multiple translation mappings when encountering general translations with very diverse domain shifts. On the other hand, StarGAN adopts an Encoder-Decoder-Discriminator (EDD) architecture, where the model is time-consuming and unstable to train. To this end, we propose a Compact, effective, robust, and fast GAN model, termed CerfGAN, to solve the above problem. In principle, CerfGAN contains a novel component, i.e., a multi-class discriminator (MCD), which gives the model an extremely powerful ability to match multiple translation mappings. To stabilize the training process, MCD also plays a role of the encoder in CerfGAN, which saves a lot of computation and memory costs. We perform extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Quantitatively, CerfGAN is demonstrated to handle a serial of image-to-image translation tasks including style transfer, season transfer, face hallucination, etc, where the input images are sampled from diverse domains. The comparisons to several recently proposed approaches demonstrate the superiority and novelty of the proposed method.
This paper describes an intuitive generalization to the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate samples while capturing diverse modes of the true data distribution. Firstly, we propose a very simple and intuitive multi-agent GAN architecture that incorporates multiple generators capable of generating samples from high probability modes. Secondly, in order to enforce different generators to generate samples from diverse modes, we propose two extensions to the standard GAN objective function. (1) We augment the generator specific GAN objective function with a diversity enforcing term that encourage different generators to generate diverse samples using a user-defined similarity based function. (2) We modify the discriminator objective function where along with finding the real and fake samples, the discriminator has to predict the generator which generated the given fake sample. Intuitively, in order to succeed in this task, the discriminator must learn to push different generators towards different identifiable modes. Our framework is generalizable in the sense that it can be easily combined with other existing variants of GANs to produce diverse samples. Experimentally we show that our framework is able to produce high quality diverse samples for the challenging tasks such as image face generation and image-to-image translation. We also show that it is capable of learning a better feature representation in an unsupervised setting.