# AniGAN: Style-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks for Unsupervised Anime Face Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12593 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12593/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [U-GAT-IT: Unsupervised Generative Attentional Networks with Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10830/) (2019)
- [PSGAN: Pose and Expression Robust Spatial-Aware GAN for Customizable Makeup Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06956/) (2019)
- [Contextual-based Image Inpainting: Infer, Match, and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08590/) (2017)
- [Exemplar Guided Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation with Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11145/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [FreeDoM: Training-Free Energy-Guided Conditional Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09833/) (2023)
- [Pastiche Master: Exemplar-Based High-Resolution Portrait Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13248/) (2022)
- [Vivid-ZOO: Multi-View Video Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08659/) (2024)
- [VToonify: Controllable High-Resolution Portrait Video Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11224/) (2022)
- [GANs N' Roses: Stable, Controllable, Diverse Image to Image Translation (works for videos too!)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06561/) (2021)
- [Automatic Animation of Hair Blowing in Still Portrait Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14207/) (2023)
- [DeformToon3D: Deformable 3D Toonification from Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04410/) (2023)
- [HyperStyle3D: Text-Guided 3D Portrait Stylization via Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09463/) (2023)
- [AgileGAN3D: Few-Shot 3D Portrait Stylization by Augmented Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14297/) (2023)
- [Combating Mode Collapse in GANs via Manifold Entropy Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12055/) (2022)
- [Fix the Noise: Disentangling Source Feature for Controllable Domain Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11545/) (2023)
- [Cartoondiff: Training-free Cartoon Image Generation with Diffusion Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08251/) (2023)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05798/) (2023)
- [Re:Draw -- Context Aware Translation as a Controllable Method for Artistic Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03499/) (2024)
- [Dynamically Masked Discriminator for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07716/) (2023)
- [Universal Face Restoration With Memorized Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01033/) (2021)
- [Improving GAN Training via Feature Space Shrinkage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01559/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Face Stylization with a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18009/) (2023)
- [Context-Preserving Two-Stage Video Domain Translation for Portrait Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19135/) (2023)
- [MontageGAN: Generation and Assembly of Multiple Components by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15577/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Portrait Stylization on the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01244/) (2022)
- [3D Face Arbitrary Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07709/) (2023)
- [FISTNet: FusIon of STyle-path generative Networks for Facial Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09020/) (2023)
- [Vision-language Assisted Attribute Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07009/) (2023)
- [ArtNeRF: A Stylized Neural Field for 3D-Aware Cartoonized Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13711/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to translate a portrait photo-face into an anime appearance. Our aim is to synthesize anime-faces which are style-consistent with a given reference anime-face. However, unlike typical translation tasks, such anime-face translation is challenging due to complex variations of appearances among anime-faces. Existing methods often fail to transfer the styles of reference anime-faces, or introduce noticeable artifacts/distortions in the local shapes of their generated faces. We propose AniGAN, a novel GAN-based translator that synthesizes high-quality anime-faces. Specifically, a new generator architecture is proposed to simultaneously transfer color/texture styles and transform local facial shapes into anime-like counterparts based on the style of a reference anime-face, while preserving the global structure of the source photo-face. We propose a double-branch discriminator to learn both domain-specific distributions and domain-shared distributions, helping generate visually pleasing anime-faces and effectively mitigate artifacts. Extensive experiments on selfie2anime and a new face2anime dataset qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. The new dataset is available at https://github.com/bing-li-ai/AniGAN .