An Image is Worth More Than a Thousand Words:
Towards Disentanglement in the Wild

Aviv Gabbay Niv Cohen Yedid Hoshen

Abstract

Unsupervised disentanglement has been shown to be theoretically impossible without inductive biases on the models and the data. As an alternative approach, recent methods rely on limited supervision to disentangle the factors of variation and allow their identifiability. While annotating the true generative factors is only required for a limited number of observations, we argue that it is infeasible to enumerate all the factors of variation that describe a real-world image distribution. To this end, we propose a method for disentangling a set of factors which are only partially labeled, as well as separating the complementary set of residual factors that are never explicitly specified. Our success in this challenging setting, demonstrated on synthetic benchmarks, gives rise to leveraging off-the-shelf image descriptors to partially annotate a subset of attributes in real image domains (e.g. of human faces) with minimal manual effort. Specifically, we use a recent language-image embedding model (CLIP) to annotate a set of attributes of interest in a zero-shot manner and demonstrate state-of-the-art disentangled image manipulation results.

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021

Human Face Manipulation

Input

Kid

Asian

Gender

Glasses

Shades

Beard

Blond Hair

Red Hair

Animal Species Translation

Input

Boerboel

Labradoodle

Shiba-Inu

Husky

Chihuahua

Cheetah

Jaguar

Bombay Cat

Arctic Fox

Car Type and Color Manipulation

Input

Jeep

Sports

Family

Black

White

Blue

Red

Yellow

BibTeX

@inproceedings{gabbay2021zerodim,
  author    = {Aviv Gabbay and Niv Cohen and Yedid Hoshen},
  title     = {An Image is Worth More Than a Thousand Words: Towards Disentanglement in the Wild},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year      = {2021}
}