The next step for the generative adversarial networks (GAN) is to learn representations that allow us to control only a certain factor in the image explicitly. Since such a representation of the factor is independent of other factors, the controllability obtained from these representations leads to interpretability by identifying the variation of the synthesized image and the transferability for downstream tasks by inference. However, since it is difficult to identify and strictly define latent factors, the annotation is laborious. Moreover, learning such representations by a GAN is challenging due to the complex generation process. Therefore, we resolve this limitation using a novel generative model that can disentangle latent space into the appearance, the x-axis, and the y-axis of the object, and reassemble these components in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, based on the concept of packing the appearance and location in each position of the feature map, we introduce a novel structural constraint technique that prevents these representations from interacting with each other. The proposed structural constraint promotes the disentanglement of these factors. In experiments, we found that the proposed method is simple but effective for controllability and allows us to control the appearance and location via latent space without supervision, as compared with the conditional GAN.
Visual Results on Translated MNIST. Proposed generative model learns to Disentangle the appearance and location of the object, Assemble them, and Synthesize images (DAS) in an unsupervised manner. Our DAS enables manipulation of the appearance (upper left), the location (upper right), the x-axis (lower left), and the y-axis (lower right) of the initial image. Please see our paper for the details.