Robust discrimination and generation of faces using compact, disentangled embeddings

Current solutions to discriminative and generative tasks in computer vision exist separately and often lack interpretability and explainability. Using faces as our application domain, here we present an architecture that is based around two core ideas that address these issues: first, our framework learns an unsupervised, low-dimensional embedding of faces using an adversarial autoencoder that is able to synthesize high-quality face images. Second, a supervised disentanglement splits the low-dimensional embedding vector into four sub-vectors, each of which contains separated information about one of four major face attributes (pose, identity, expression, and style) that can be used both for discriminative tasks and for manipulating all four attributes in an explicit manner. The resulting architecture achieves state-of-the-art image quality, good discrimination and face retrieval results on each of the four attributes, and supports various face editing tasks using a face representation of only 99 dimensions. Finally, we apply the architecture's robust image synthesis capabilities to visually debug label-quality issues in an existing face dataset.