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Title: Unaligned Image-to-Sequence Transformation with Loop Consistency

Paper content:
We tackle the problem of modeling sequential visual phenomena.
Given examples of a phenomena that can be divided into discrete time steps, we aim to take an input from any such time and realize this input at all other time steps in the sequence.
Furthermore, we aim to do this \textit{without} ground-truth aligned sequences --- avoiding the difficulties needed for gathering aligned data.
This generalizes the unpaired image-to-image problem from generating pairs to generating sequences.
We extend cycle consistency to \textit{loop consistency} and alleviate difficulties associated with learning in the resulting long chains of computation.
We show competitive results compared to existing image-to-image techniques when modeling several different data sets including the Earth's seasons and aging of human faces.
Image-to-image translation has gained tremendous attention in recent years.
A pioneering work by shows that it is possible to realize a real image from one domain as a highly realistic and semantically meaningful image in another when paired data between the domains are available.
Furthermore, CycleGAN extended the image-to-image translation framework in an unpaired manner by relying on the ability to build a strong prior in each domain based off generative adversarial networks (GANs, (Goodfellow et al., 2014) ) and enforcing consistency on the cyclic transformation from and to a domain.
Methods (Kim et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2017) similar to CycleGAN have also been developed roughly around the same time.
Since its birth, CycleGAN has become a widely adopted technique with applications even beyond computer vision (Fu et al., 2018) .
However, CycleGAN family models are still somewhat limited since they only handle the translation problem (directly) between two domains.
Modeling more than two domains would require separate instantiations of CycleGAN between any two pairs of domains -resulting in a quadratic model complexity.
A major recent work, StarGAN (Choi et al., 2018) , addresses this by facilitating a fully connected domain-translation graph, allowing transformation between two arbitrary domains with a single model.
This flexibility, however, appears restricted to domains corresponding to specific attribute changes such as emotions and appearance.
Within nature, a multitude of settings exist where neither a set of pairs nor a fully-connected graph are the most natural representations of how one might proceed from one domain to another.
In particular, many natural processes are sequentialand therefore the translation process should reflect this.
A common phenomena modeled as an image-to-image task is the visual change of natural scenes between two seasons , e.g., Winter and Summer.
This neglects the fact that nature first proceeds to Spring after Winter and Fall after Summer and therefore the pairing induces a very discontinuous reflection of the underlying process.
Instead, we hope that by modeling a higher resolution discretization of this process, the model can more realistically approach the true model while reducing the necessary complexity of the model.
It is difficult to obtain paired data for many image-to-image problems.
Aligned sequential are even more difficult to come by.
Thus, it is more plausible to gather a large number of examples from each step (domain) in a sequence without correspondences between the content of the examples.
Therefore, we consider a setting similar to unpaired image-to-image transformation where we only have access to unaligned examples from each time step of the sequence being modeled.
Given an example from an arbitrary point in the sequence, we then generate an aligned sequence over all other time steps -expecting a faithful realization of the image at each step.
The key condition that required is that after generating an entire loop (returning from the last domain to the input domain), one should expect to return to the original input.
This is quite a weak condition and promotes model flexibility.
We denote this extension to the cycle consistency of as loop consistency and therefore name our approach as Loop-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (LoopGAN).
This is a departure from many image-to-image approaches that have very short (usually length 2) paths of computation defining what it means to have gone "there and back", e.g. the ability to enforce reconstruction or consistency.
Since we do not have aligned sequences, the lengths of these paths for LoopGAN are as large as the number of domains being modeled and require different approaches to make learning feasible.
These are not entirely different from the problems that often arise in recurrent neural networks and we can draw similarities to our model as a memory-less recurrent structure with applied to images.
We apply our method to the sequential phenomena of human aging (Zhang & Qi, 2017) and the seasons of the Alps (Anoosheh et al., 2018) with extensive comparisons with baseline methods for image-to-image translation.
We also present additional results on gradually changing azimuth angle of chairs and gradual change of face attributes to showcased the flexibility of our model.
We show favorable results against baseline methods for image-to-image translation in spite of allowing for them to have substantially larger model complexity.
This is consistent with how CycleGAN is trained where two cycles are included.
We proposed an extension to the family of image-to-image translation methods when the set of domains corresponds to a sequence of domains.
We require that the translation task can be modeled as a consistent loop.
This allows us to use a shared generator across all time steps leading to significant efficiency gains over a nave chaining of bi-domain image translation architectures.
Despite this, our architecture shows favorable results when compared with the classic CycleGAN family algorithms.

assistant: text: LoopGAN extends cycle length in CycleGAN to enable unaligned sequential transformation for more than two time steps.