  Recent generative adversarial networks (GANs) are able to generate impressive
photo-realistic images. However, controllable generation with GANs remains a
challenging research problem. Achieving controllable generation requires
semantically interpretable and disentangled factors of variation. It is
challenging to achieve this goal using simple fixed distributions such as
Gaussian distribution. Instead, we propose an unsupervised framework to learn a
distribution of latent codes that control the generator through self-training.
Self-training provides an iterative feedback in the GAN training, from the
discriminator to the generator, and progressively improves the proposal of the
latent codes as training proceeds. The latent codes are sampled from a latent
variable model that is learned in the feature space of the discriminator. We
consider a normalized independent component analysis model and learn its
parameters through tensor factorization of the higher-order moments. Our
framework exhibits better disentanglement compared to other variants such as
the variational autoencoder, and is able to discover semantically meaningful
latent codes without any supervision. We demonstrate empirically on both cars
and faces datasets that each group of elements in the learned code controls a
mode of variation with a semantic meaning, e.g. pose or background change. We
also demonstrate with quantitative metrics that our method generates better
results compared to other approaches.

Machine Learning;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning