# Generating Furry Cars: Disentangling Object Shape & Appearance across Multiple Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02052/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10916/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Texture Networks: Feed-forward Synthesis of Textures and Stylized Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03417/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10915/) (2017)
- [Disentangled Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02621/) (2017)
- [Synthesizing Images of Humans in Unseen Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07739/) (2018)
- [Image-to-image translation for cross-domain disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09730/) (2018)
- [Deforming Autoencoders: Unsupervised Disentangling of Shape and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06503/) (2018)
- [FineGAN: Unsupervised Hierarchical Disentanglement for Fine-Grained Object Generation and Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11155/) (2018)
- [MixNMatch: Multifactor Disentanglement and Encoding for Conditional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11758/) (2019)
- [Reconstruction-Based Disentanglement for Pose-invariant Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03041/) (2017)
- [Disentangling Factors of Variation by Mixing Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07410/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Disentangled Representation Learning with Analogical Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09502/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CoordGAN: Self-Supervised Dense Correspondences Emerge from GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16521/) (2022)
- [GP-UNIT: Generative Prior for Versatile Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04636/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks and Adversarial Autoencoders: Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13282/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the novel task of learning disentangled representations of object shape and appearance across multiple domains (e.g., dogs and cars). The goal is to learn a generative model that learns an intermediate distribution, which borrows a subset of properties from each domain, enabling the generation of images that did not exist in any domain exclusively. This challenging problem requires an accurate disentanglement of object shape, appearance, and background from each domain, so that the appearance and shape factors from the two domains can be interchanged. We augment an existing approach that can disentangle factors within a single domain but struggles to do so across domains. Our key technical contribution is to represent object appearance with a differentiable histogram of visual features, and to optimize the generator so that two images with the same latent appearance factor but different latent shape factors produce similar histograms. On multiple multi-domain datasets, we demonstrate our method leads to accurate and consistent appearance and shape transfer across domains.