# PandA: Unsupervised Learning of Parts and Appearances in the Feature Maps of GANs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (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)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (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)
- [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)
- [EditGAN: High-Precision Semantic Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03186/) (2021)
- [Rewriting a Deep Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15646/) (2020)
- [Semantic Hierarchy Emerges in Deep Generative Representations for Scene Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09267/) (2019)
- [TensorLy: Tensor Learning in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09555/) (2016)
- [Controlling generative models with continuous factors of variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10238/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Spatial Dimensions of Latent in GAN for Real-time Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14754/) (2021)
- [Deep Feature Factorization For Concept Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10206/) (2018)
- [Low-Rank Subspaces in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04488/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [HyperReenact: One-Shot Reenactment via Jointly Learning to Refine and Retarget Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10797/) (2023)
- [Attribute-preserving Face Dataset Anonymization via Latent Code Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11296/) (2023)
- [EmerDiff: Emerging Pixel-level Semantic Knowledge in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11739/) (2024)
- [StyleMask: Disentangling the Style Space of StyleGAN2 for Neural Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13375/) (2022)
- [Latent Traversals in Generative Models as Potential Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12944/) (2023)
- [DiffusionAct: Controllable Diffusion Autoencoder for One-shot Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17217/) (2024)
- [Are CLIP features all you need for Universal Synthetic Image Origin Attribution?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09153/) (2024)
- [Improving Fairness using Vision-Language Driven Image Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01573/) (2023)
- [Flow Factorized Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13167/) (2023)
- [MM2Latent: Text-to-facial image generation and editing in GANs with multimodal assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11010/) (2024)
- [One-shot Neural Face Reenactment via Finding Directions in GAN's Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03553/) (2024)
- [Householder Projector for Unsupervised Latent Semantics Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08012/) (2023)
- [Towards Interpretability Without Sacrifice: Faithful Dense Layer Decomposition with Mixture of Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21364/) (2025)
- [Constructing Interpretable Features from Compositional Neuron Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10920/) (2025)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Unconditional Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14395/) (2024)
- [Enabling Local Editing in Diffusion Models by Joint and Individual Component Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16845/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning from Sparse Transformation Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05564/) (2024)
- [StyleHumanCLIP: Text-guided Garment Manipulation for StyleGAN-Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16759/) (2023)
- [Controlling the image generation process with parametric activation functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15778/) (2025)
- [Learning Private Representations through Entropy-based Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10194/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in the understanding of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have led to remarkable progress in visual editing and synthesis tasks, capitalizing on the rich semantics that are embedded in the latent spaces of pre-trained GANs. However, existing methods are often tailored to specific GAN architectures and are limited to either discovering global semantic directions that do not facilitate localized control, or require some form of supervision through manually provided regions or segmentation masks. In this light, we present an architecture-agnostic approach that jointly discovers factors representing spatial parts and their appearances in an entirely unsupervised fashion. These factors are obtained by applying a semi-nonnegative tensor factorization on the feature maps, which in turn enables context-aware local image editing with pixel-level control. In addition, we show that the discovered appearance factors correspond to saliency maps that localize concepts of interest, without using any labels. Experiments on a wide range of GAN architectures and datasets show that, in comparison to the state of the art, our method is far more efficient in terms of training time and, most importantly, provides much more accurate localized control. Our code is available at: https://github.com/james-oldfield/PandA.