Learning Disentangled Representations for Image Translation

Recent approaches for unsupervised image translation are strongly reliant on generative adversarial training and architectural locality constraints. Despite their appealing results, it can be easily observed that the learned class and content representations are entangled which often hurts the translation performance. To this end, we propose OverLORD, for learning disentangled representations for the image class and attributes, utilizing latent optimization and carefully designed content and style bottlenecks. We further argue that the commonly used adversarial optimization can be decoupled from representation disentanglement and be applied at a later stage of the training to increase the perceptual quality of the generated images. Based on these principles, our model learns significantly more disentangled representations and achieves higher translation quality and greater output diversity than state-of-the-art methods.