# StEP: Style-based Encoder Pre-training for Multi-modal Image Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Learned Spatial Representations for Few-shot Talking-Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14557/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation with Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03641/) (2022)
- [Chop & Learn: Recognizing and Generating Object-State Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14339/) (2023)
- [GP-UNIT: Generative Prior for Versatile Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04636/) (2023)
- [Frequency-Aware Self-Supervised Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04723/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Image to Image Translation for Multiple Retinal Pathology Synthesis in Optical Coherence Tomography Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06031/) (2021)
- [Reconciling Semantic Controllability and Diversity for Remote Sensing Image Synthesis with Hybrid Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14781/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel approach for multi-modal Image-to-image (I2I) translation. To tackle the one-to-many relationship between input and output domains, previous works use complex training objectives to learn a latent embedding, jointly with the generator, that models the variability of the output domain. In contrast, we directly model the style variability of images, independent of the image synthesis task. Specifically, we pre-train a generic style encoder using a novel proxy task to learn an embedding of images, from arbitrary domains, into a low-dimensional style latent space. The learned latent space introduces several advantages over previous traditional approaches to multi-modal I2I translation. First, it is not dependent on the target dataset, and generalizes well across multiple domains. Second, it learns a more powerful and expressive latent space, which improves the fidelity of style capture and transfer. The proposed style pre-training also simplifies the training objective and speeds up the training significantly. Furthermore, we provide a detailed study of the contribution of different loss terms to the task of multi-modal I2I translation, and propose a simple alternative to VAEs to enable sampling from unconstrained latent spaces. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art results on six challenging benchmarks with a simple training objective that includes only a GAN loss and a reconstruction loss.