# ContraFeat: Contrasting Deep Features for Semantic Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07277/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Disentangling by Factorising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/) (2018)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5298/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Variational Inference of Disentangled Latent Concepts from Unlabeled Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00848/) (2017)
- [Weakly-Supervised Disentanglement Without Compromises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02886/) (2020)
- [Flexibly Fair Representation Learning by Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02589/) (2019)
- [On the Fairness of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13662/) (2019)
- [Deep Convolutional Inverse Graphics Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03167/) (2015)
- [Fader Networks: Manipulating Images by Sliding Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00409/) (2017)
- [Domain Agnostic Learning with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12347/) (2019)
- [Multi-Level Variational Autoencoder: Learning Disentangled Representations from Grouped Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08841/) (2017)
- [Attribute2Image: Conditional Image Generation from Visual Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00570/) (2015)
- [Controlling generative models with continuous factors of variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10238/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

StyleGAN has shown strong potential for disentangled semantic control, thanks to its special design of multi-layer intermediate latent variables. However, existing semantic discovery methods on StyleGAN rely on manual selection of modified latent layers to obtain satisfactory manipulation results, which is tedious and demanding. In this paper, we propose a model that automates this process and achieves state-of-the-art semantic discovery performance. The model consists of an attention-equipped navigator module and losses contrasting deep-feature changes. We propose two model variants, with one contrasting samples in a binary manner, and another one contrasting samples with learned prototype variation patterns. The proposed losses are defined with pretrained deep features, based on our assumption that the features can implicitly reveal the desired semantic structure including consistency and orthogonality. Additionally, we design two metrics to quantitatively evaluate the performance of semantic discovery methods on FFHQ dataset, and also show that disentangled representations can be derived via a simple training process. Experimentally, our models can obtain state-of-the-art semantic discovery results without relying on latent layer-wise manual selection, and these discovered semantics can be used to manipulate real-world images.