# ACE: Zero-Shot Image to Image Translation via Pretrained Auto-Contrastive-Encoder

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11705 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11705/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Swapping Autoencoder for Deep Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00653/) (2020)
- [Neural Style Transfer: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04058/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning on Image Denoising: An overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13171/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Truly Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06500/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Unsupervised Cross Domain Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06029/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CycleNet: Rethinking Cycle Consistency in Text-Guided Diffusion for Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13165/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-to-image translation is a fundamental task in computer vision. It transforms images from one domain to images in another domain so that they have particular domain-specific characteristics. Most prior works train a generative model to learn the mapping from a source domain to a target domain. However, learning such mapping between domains is challenging because data from different domains can be highly unbalanced in terms of both quality and quantity. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to extract image features by learning the similarities and differences of samples within the same data distribution via a novel contrastive learning framework, which we call Auto-Contrastive-Encoder (ACE). ACE learns the content code as the similarity between samples with the same content information and different style perturbations. The design of ACE enables us to achieve zero-shot image-to-image translation with no training on image translation tasks for the first time. Moreover, our learning method can learn the style features of images on different domains effectively. Consequently, our model achieves competitive results on multimodal image translation tasks with zero-shot learning as well. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential of our method in transfer learning. With fine-tuning, the quality of translated images improves in unseen domains. Even though we use contrastive learning, all of our training can be performed on a single GPU with the batch size of 8.
