# DragGANSpace: Latent Space Exploration and Control for GANs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22169/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [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)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10973/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work integrates StyleGAN, DragGAN and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to enhance the latent space efficiency and controllability of GAN-generated images. Style-GAN provides a structured latent space, DragGAN enables intuitive image manipulation, and PCA reduces dimensionality and facilitates cross-model alignment for more streamlined and interpretable exploration of latent spaces. We apply our techniques to the Animal Faces High Quality (AFHQ) dataset, and find that our approach of integrating PCA-based dimensionality reduction with the Drag-GAN framework for image manipulation retains performance while improving optimization efficiency. Notably, introducing PCA into the latent W+ layers of DragGAN can consistently reduce the total optimization time while maintaining good visual quality and even boosting the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of the optimized image, particularly in shallower latent spaces (W+ layers = 3). We also demonstrate capability for aligning images generated by two StyleGAN models trained on similar but distinct data domains (AFHQ-Dog and AFHQ-Cat), and show that we can control the latent space of these aligned images to manipulate the images in an intuitive and interpretable manner. Our findings highlight the possibility for efficient and interpretable latent space control for a wide range of image synthesis and editing applications.