# Fantastic Style Channels and Where to Find Them: A Submodular Framework for Discovering Diverse Directions in GANs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepFakes: a New Threat to Face Recognition? Assessment and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08685/) (2018)
- [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)
- [LatentCLR: A Contrastive Learning Approach for Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00820/) (2021)
- [Segmentation in Style: Unsupervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Stylegan and CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12518/) (2021)
- [Retrieve in Style: Unsupervised Facial Feature Transfer and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06256/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LatentSwap3D: Semantic Edits on 3D Image GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01381/) (2022)
- [LoRAverse: A Submodular Framework to Retrieve Diverse Adapters for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15022/) (2025)
- [Fusing Conditional Submodular GAN and Programmatic Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10366/) (2023)
- [RankT2I: A Submodular Framework for Discovering Interpretable and Diverse Semantics in Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14226/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The discovery of interpretable directions in the latent spaces of pre-trained GAN models has recently become a popular topic. In particular, StyleGAN2 has enabled various image generation and manipulation tasks due to its rich and disentangled latent spaces. The discovery of such directions is typically done either in a supervised manner, which requires annotated data for each desired manipulation or in an unsupervised manner, which requires a manual effort to identify the directions. As a result, existing work typically finds only a handful of directions in which controllable edits can be made. In this study, we design a novel submodular framework that finds the most representative and diverse subset of directions in the latent space of StyleGAN2. Our approach takes advantage of the latent space of channel-wise style parameters, so-called style space, in which we cluster channels that perform similar manipulations into groups. Our framework promotes diversity by using the notion of clusters and can be efficiently solved with a greedy optimization scheme. We evaluate our framework with qualitative and quantitative experiments and show that our method finds more diverse and disentangled directions. Our project page can be found at http://catlab-team.github.io/fantasticstyles.