Paper:
Text-Adaptive Generative Adversarial Networks: Manipulating Images with Natural Language
This paper addresses the problem of manipulating images using natural language description. Our task aims to semantically modify visual attributes of an object in an image according to the text describing the new visual appearance. Although existing methods synthesize images having new attributes, they do not fully preserve textirrelevant contents of the original image. In this paper, we propose the text-adaptive generative adversarial network (TAGAN) to generate semantically manipulated images while preserving text-irrelevant contents. The key to our method is the text-adaptive discriminator that creates word-level local discriminators according to input text to classify fine-grained attributes independently. With this discriminator, the generator learns to generate images where only regions that correspond to the given text are modified. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods on CUB and Oxford-102 datasets, and our results were mostly preferred on a user study. Extensive analysis shows that our method is able to effectively disentangle visual attributes and produce pleasing outputs.

Review:
After rebuttal comments: * readability: I trust the authors to update the paper based on my suggestions (as they agreed to in their rebuttal). * reproducibility: the authors gave clear guidelines in the rebuttal of how their produced their results. For AttrGAN, they did change the weight sweep and for SISGAN they used the same hyperparameters as they used in their method (which I would object to in general, but given that the authors took most of their hyperparameters from DCGAN, does not create an unfair advantage). I expect the additional details of the experimental results to be added in the paper (as supplementary material).   ###################  Main idea:  ------------------ Task: Manipulate images based on text instruction. Ensure that content that is not relevant to the text does not change.  Method: to avoid changing too much of the image, use local discriminators that learn the presence of individual visual attributes. The discriminator is a weighted combination of the local discriminators which determine whether a visual attribute (feature map in a convolutional image encoder) is related to a particular word. The local discriminators are combined using attention on the word vectors.  Results: substantially improving on state of the art on modifying images based on text descriptions. However, the details of how the baselines are trained are not specified (see below).  Reviewer knowledge: I am familiar with the GAN literature, but prior to reading this paper I have not been aware of work in manipulating images with text. I was not familiar with baselines (SISGAN and AttnGAN) before reading this paper.  Comment on my rating: I am willing to increase my review substantially if the paper clarity substantially increases (see below) and if more details about the baseline training are released.  Quality: -------- The idea and the experiments presented in the paper are interesting, and definitely worth noting. However, the paper suffers due to a lack of clarity (see below).   Paper not fully reproducible and it is not clear how the baselines were trained: details of data augmentation are not fully specified (lines 171-172), details of training are also lacking, especially for the baselines. Were the same architectures used, or were the ones in the original papers used? Where the hyperparameters tuned on the presented method (this would severely cause a disadvantage to the baselines)? Specifically for SISGAN, the SISGAN paper introduces two version (with and without VGG) and it is not clear to which this paper is comparing.  Originality ----------- Comparison with prior work: Not sufficient in the paper, but by reading the two baseline papers, SISGAN and AttnGAN, I believe the current work introduces the following differences: 1) Difference compared to AttnGAN * AttnGAN does not work with text, but with attributes (the goal is to generate an image with a an attribute change from the original image). This is a simpler task, so there is no need for local discriminators.  * AttnGAN also uses a reconstruction loss, and an unconditional adversarial loss (using WGAN). The difference lies in the conditional version of the model, where in the presented work a conditional GAN is used, while AttnGAN  uses an additional classifier which ensures that the attributes are preserved.  2) Difference compared to SISGAN SISGAN tackles the same problem as the one in this paper: changing images based on text instructions. The approach of combining the image and text embeddings in the encoder through residual blocks is used in both papers. in SISGAN, there is no unconditional discriminator - the discriminator sees pairs of fake data with real text as “fake”. The advantage of the current approach compared to SISGAN is that it ensures that the generated images are realistic, independent on the text association. SISGAN does not use a local discriminator that looks at individual words. The advantage of the presented method is the attention and the focus on individual words, which helps with generalization to new sentences.  The paper does introduce a novel idea, of the text adaptive discriminator. The discriminator learns association between individual words and individual feature maps of the image feature learner, and combines these into creating a global discriminator.  It is not clear to me why in equation (3), the attention is taken over the average temporal word embedding. Would using a learned attention structure here not be better?  Significance:  ------------- The results in the paper are impressive. Compared to the baselines, more content is preserved, and only text specific information is changed. The images are impressive, and the results in Table 1 show an improvement in quality based on human evaluation on a large number of samples. The paper also shows that the results are applicable for image-text similarity, as seen in Table 2. They improve or compete with state of the art in that domain as well.  One important point of the paper is that it performs analysis on the presented method. First, they look at at the text adaptive discriminator, and visualizing the class activation maps per layer. By using class activation maps, one can see to see how the model is focusing on different aspects of the image at different locations in the network. Second, they perform sentence interpolation on the text to see the different generated images, and show interpretable results. The results here are impressive too, with the model showing generalization in embedding space. Though this is limited to the particular image shown in Figure 7, it is an interesting result.  Clarity: ------ Overall: This is where the paper lacks most. The core ideas need more detail, and core concepts are not explained. Concrete example: “visual attributes" are concretely defined late in the paper, and there vaguely too. The set up of the paper is not clearly described early in the paper (what is a “positive” and what is a “negative” example text?), and the reader has to infer this from the content later on. The datasets used have (x, t) examples of images and text relevant to that image. These are the positive examples. The negative examples are obtained by sampling another t from the data. The most relevant related work is also vaguely described (I had to read the two prior relevant papers to understand the differences).  Detailed feedback: The introduction section which describes the proposed method (46-58) could have been sharper. I felt there was either not enough detail, or too much detail, depending on the view the authors wanted to take. Perhaps a rewrite would just fix this impression.  Line 94: typo: to reconstruct a latent noise vector.   Discussion of related work: This discussion could have been made clear by expanding on the related work in 93-100. This is by far the most relevant prior work, but gets less attention than the other prior work described.   Lines 111-112: “we train the RNN in the generator from scratch. “ Perhaps “we train the RNN from scratch, without pretraining.”  Lines 115-116: “Therefore, we use the reconstruction loss [27] when positive pairs of the image and the text are forwarded”. So far it is not clear what the positive examples are, so this sentence is confusing. If the problem statement was more clearly defined, this would not be an issue. One needs to state that positive examples are x and t that refer to the same content, taken from the dataset.  Lines 120-127: The definition of “visual attribute" should be made clearer here. $v$ is used to represent the visual attribute, so perhaps its definition should be moved at the end of line 127.  Line  179: “Although AttnGAN was originally designed for the text-to-image synthesis”. I think there is a not missing there.  Lines 183-185 “The inception score [30] is also not proper for this problem since the mix-up of inter-class attributes may lower the score.” This sentence is not clear - but I agree that in this case Inception score will only try to measure image quality, not relevance to text.   Lines 228-229: “the saliency map that a world classifier attends to”. Again, here it could be made more clear that this refers to the component classifiers of the discriminator, that learn to classify per word embedding  and visual map (Equation 3). When describing figure 5, it would be useful to point out that the floating point numbers are the betas referred to in equation 5.