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Title: Understanding the (Un)interpretability of Natural Image Distributions Using Generative Models

Paper content:
Probability density estimation is a classical and well studied problem, but standard density estimation methods have historically lacked the power to model complex and high-dimensional image distributions.
More recent generative models leverage the power of neural networks to implicitly learn and represent probability models over complex images.
We describe methods to extract explicit probability density estimates from GANs, and explore the properties of these image density functions.
We perform sanity check experiments to provide evidence that these probabilities are reasonable.
However, we also show that density functions of natural images are difficult to interpret and thus limited in use.
We study reasons for this lack of interpretability, and suggest that we can get better interpretability by doing density estimation on latent representations of images.
Researchers have long sought to estimate the probability density functions (PDFs) of images.
The resulting generative models can be used in image synthesis, outlier detection, image restoration, and in classification.
There have been some impressive successes, including building generative models of textures for texture synthesis, and using low-level statistical models for image denoising.
However, building accurate densities for full, complex images remains challenging.
Recently there has been a flurry of activity in building deep generative models of complex images, including the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) (Goodfellow et al., 2014) to generate stunningly realistic complex images.
While some deep models, like VAEs, focus explicitly on building probability densities of images, we focus on GANs, leveraging their rapid improvements.
Implicitly, these GANs also encode probability densities.
In this paper we explore whether these implicit densities capture the intuition of a probable image.
We show that in some sense the answer is "no".
But, we suggest that by computing PDFs over latent representations of images, we can do better.
We first propose some methods for extracting probability densities from GANs.
It is well known that when a bijective function maps one density to another, the relationship between the two densities can be understood using the determinant of the Jacobian of the function.
GANs are not bijective, and map a low-dimensional latent space to a high-dimensional image space.
In this case, we modify the standard formula so that we can extract the probability density value of an image given its latent representation.
This allows us to compute densities of images generated by the GAN, which we then use to train a regressor that computes densities of arbitrary images.
We perform sanity checks to ensure that GANs do indeed produce reasonable densities on images.
We show that GANs produce similar densities for training images and for held out test images from the same distribution.
We also show that when we compute the density of either real or generated images, the most likely (highest density value) images are of low complexity, and the least likely images are of high complexity.
An example of this last result is shown in Figure 1 , which displays the images with highest and lowest densities among samples generated by a StackGAN (Zhang et al., 2017 ) and a StyleGAN (Karras et al., 2018) .
The StackGAN images are conditioned on two different captions, and the StyleGAN images are from models trained on two different datasets.
Unfortunately, we also show that probability densities learned on images are difficult to interpret and have unintuitive behaviors.
The strong influence of visual complexity on the learned PDF causes irrelevant background details to dominate the shape of the distribution; we see that the most likely images tend to contain small objects with large, simple backgrounds, while images with complex backgrounds are deemed unlikely despite being otherwise sensible.
For example, for a GAN trained on MNIST, all of the most likely digits are 1, despite each type of digit occurring in equal proportion in the training set.
If we exclude 1s from the training data and then compute the densities of all MNIST digits under this altered distribution, the most likely digits are still 1s, even though the GAN never saw them during training.
In fact, even if we train a GAN on CIFAR images of real objects, the GAN will produce higher densities for MNIST images of 1s than for most of the CIFAR images.
Theoretically, this is not surprising: high-dimensional density functions tend to have peaks of very large probability density away from "typical" points.
Consider the example of a high-dimensional Gaussian with an identity covariance matrix, which has large density values at its center, though most sampled points lie near the unit sphere.
In practice, this becomes a problem when real images inhabit these high-density peaks, because .
We investigate these unintuitive properties of density functions in detail, and explore reasons for this lack of interpretability.
We propose to mitigate this problem by doing probability density estimation on the latent representations of the images, rather than their pixel representations.
With this approach we obtain probability distributions with inliers and outliers that seem to coincide more closely with our intuition.
In the Gaussian latent space, the problem of natural images lying near high-density peaks is mitigated: natural images correspond to latent codes near the unit sphere, putting them on more equal footing with one another.
Outliers can then be detected by finding images with density values that are lower or higher than expected.
In parallel to our work, Nalisnick et al. (2018) also addresses the interpretability of density functions over images, claiming that seemingly uninterpretable density estimates result from inaccurate estimation on out-of-sample images (Nalisnick et al., 2018) .
Our thesis is different, as we argue that density estimation is often accurate even for unusual images, but the true underlying density function (even if known exactly) is fundamentally difficult to interpret.
(Welinder et al., 2010) , conditioned on the caption "A bird with a very long wing span and a long pointed beak."
Second row: Samples from StackGAN conditioned on the caption "This bird has a white eye with a red round shaped beak."
Third row:
Samples from a StyleGAN model pretrained on the LSUN Bedroom dataset (Yu et al., 2015) .
Bottom row: Samples from a StyleGAN model pretrained on the Flickr-Faces-HQ dataset (Karras et al., 2018) .
Using the power of GANs, we explored the density functions of complex image distributions.
Unfortunately, inliers and outliers of these density functions cannot be readily interpreted as typical and atypical images, at least according to human intuition.
However, we suggest that this lack of interpretability could be mitigated by considering the probability densities not of the images themselves, but of the latent codes that produced them.
We postulate that such feature embeddings avoid the problems of pixel-space densities (which are too dependent on pixel-level image properties such as background uniformity), and instead allow for representations that are more semantically meaningful.
There are a host of potential applications for the resulting image PDFs, including detecting outliers and domain shift that will be explored in future work.
Other Ones Figure 8 : Left: histogram of log probability densities of MNIST and CIFAR, predicted using a pixel-space density estimator for CIFAR.
Middle: histogram of log densities of MNIST and CIFAR, predicted using the latent code regressor for a GAN trained on CIFAR.
Right: histogram of log densities of MNIST, as predicted by a latent code regressor for a GAN trained on MNIST.
Note that the log density values are much more clustered than in pixel space, though they are still near the top of the distribution.

assistant: text: We examine the relationship between probability density values and image content in non-invertible GANs.