# SpaceEdit: Learning a Unified Editing Space for Open-Domain Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03552/) (2016)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00948/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in the GAN Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03754/) (2020)
- [On the "steerability" of generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07171/) (2019)
- [Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10428/) (2021)
- [GANalyze: Toward Visual Definitions of Cognitive Image Properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10112/) (2019)
- [Editing in Style: Uncovering the Local Semantics of GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14367/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Style Transfer via Wavelet Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09760/) (2019)
- [ManiGAN: Text-Guided Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06203/) (2019)
- [Mode Seeking Generative Adversarial Networks for Diverse Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05628/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Language-Guided Face Animation by Recurrent StyleGAN-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05617/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Visual Editing with a Generatively Pre-Trained Artist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01668/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, large pretrained models (e.g., BERT, StyleGAN, CLIP) have shown great knowledge transfer and generalization capability on various downstream tasks within their domains. Inspired by these efforts, in this paper we propose a unified model for open-domain image editing focusing on color and tone adjustment of open-domain images while keeping their original content and structure. Our model learns a unified editing space that is more semantic, intuitive, and easy to manipulate than the operation space (e.g., contrast, brightness, color curve) used in many existing photo editing softwares. Our model belongs to the image-to-image translation framework which consists of an image encoder and decoder, and is trained on pairs of before- and after-images to produce multimodal outputs. We show that by inverting image pairs into latent codes of the learned editing space, our model can be leveraged for various downstream editing tasks such as language-guided image editing, personalized editing, editing-style clustering, retrieval, etc. We extensively study the unique properties of the editing space in experiments and demonstrate superior performance on the aforementioned tasks.