# Multi-cropping Contrastive Learning and Domain Consistency for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [FcaNet: Frequency Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11879/) (2020)
- [Gather-Excite: Exploiting Feature Context in Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12348/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Image Super-Resolution using Cycle-in-Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00437/) (2018)
- [Strip Pooling: Rethinking Spatial Pooling for Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13328/) (2020)
- [Geometry-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks for One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05852/) (2018)
- [One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00826/) (2017)
- [Rotate to Attend: Convolutional Triplet Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03045/) (2020)
- [The Spatially-Correlative Loss for Various Image Translation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00854/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [UltraHR-100K: Enhancing UHR Image Synthesis with A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20661/) (2025)
- [LUVE : Latent-Cascaded Ultra-High-Resolution Video Generation with Dual Frequency Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11564/) (2026)
- [From Zero to Detail: A Progressive Spectral Decoupling Paradigm for UHD Image Restoration with New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15654/) (2026)
- [Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01667/) (2026)
- [Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18644/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, unsupervised image-to-image translation methods based on contrastive learning have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. However, in the previous works, the negatives are sampled from the input image itself, which inspires us to design a data augmentation method to improve the quality of the selected negatives. Moreover, the previous methods only preserve the content consistency via patch-wise contrastive learning in the embedding space, which ignores the domain consistency between the generated images and the real images of the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised image-to-image translation framework based on multi-cropping contrastive learning and domain consistency, called MCDUT. Specifically, we obtain the multi-cropping views via the center-cropping and the random-cropping with the aim of further generating the high-quality negative examples. To constrain the embeddings in the deep feature space, we formulate a new domain consistency loss, which encourages the generated images to be close to the real images in the embedding space of the same domain. Furthermore, we present a dual coordinate attention network by embedding positional information into the channel, which called DCA. We employ the DCA network in the design of generator, which makes the generator capture the horizontal and vertical global information of dependency. In many image-to-image translation tasks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, and the advantages of our method have been proven through extensive comparison experiments and ablation research.