# TransferI2I: Transfer Learning for Image-to-Image Translation from Small Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06219 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06219/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [Image Generation from Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01622/) (2018)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00948/) (2018)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [On the "steerability" of generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07171/) (2019)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05751/) (2015)
- [GANalyze: Toward Visual Definitions of Cognitive Image Properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10112/) (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)
- [Transferring GANs: generating images from limited data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01677/) (2018)

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

- [ManiFest: Manifold Deformation for Few-shot Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13681/) (2021)
- [Exploring Negatives in Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11018/) (2022)
- [Transferring Unconditional to Conditional GANs with Hyper-Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02219/) (2021)
- [3D-Aware Multi-Class Image-to-Image Translation with NeRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15012/) (2023)
- [Shape-Preserving Generation of Food Images for Automatic Dietary Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13358/) (2024)
- [EqGAN: Feature Equalization Fusion for Few-shot Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14638/) (2023)
- [Mechanisms of Generative Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10368/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-to-image (I2I) translation has matured in recent years and is able to generate high-quality realistic images. However, despite current success, it still faces important challenges when applied to small domains. Existing methods use transfer learning for I2I translation, but they still require the learning of millions of parameters from scratch. This drawback severely limits its application on small domains. In this paper, we propose a new transfer learning for I2I translation (TransferI2I). We decouple our learning process into the image generation step and the I2I translation step. In the first step we propose two novel techniques: source-target initialization and self-initialization of the adaptor layer. The former finetunes the pretrained generative model (e.g., StyleGAN) on source and target data. The latter allows to initialize all non-pretrained network parameters without the need of any data. These techniques provide a better initialization for the I2I translation step. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary GAN that further facilitates the training of deep I2I systems even from small datasets. In extensive experiments on three datasets, (Animal faces, Birds, and Foods), we show that we outperform existing methods and that mFID improves on several datasets with over 25 points.