CoC-GAN: Employing Context Cluster for Unveiling a New Pathway in Image Generation

Image generation tasks are traditionally undertaken using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Transformer architectures for feature aggregating and dispatching. Despite the frequent application of convolution and attention structures, these structures are not fundamentally required to solve the problem of instability and the lack of interpretability in image generation. In this paper, we propose a unique image generation process premised on the perspective of converting images into a set of point clouds. In other words, we interpret an image as a set of points. As such, our methodology leverages simple clustering methods named Context Clustering (CoC) to generate images from unordered point sets, which defies the convention of using convolution or attention mechanisms. Hence, we exclusively depend on this clustering technique, combined with the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) in a generative model. Furthermore, we implement the integration of a module termed the 'Point Increaser' for the model. This module is just an MLP tasked with generating additional points for clustering, which are subsequently integrated within the paradigm of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We introduce this model with the novel structure as the Context Clustering Generative Adversarial Network (CoC-GAN), which offers a distinctive viewpoint in the domain of feature aggregating and dispatching. Empirical evaluations affirm that our CoC-GAN, devoid of convolution and attention mechanisms, exhibits outstanding performance. Its interpretability, endowed by the CoC module, also allows for visualization in our experiments. The promising results underscore the feasibility of our method and thus warrant future investigations of applying Context Clustering to more novel and interpretable image generation.