GUIDEGAN:  ATTENTION  BASED  SPATIAL  GUIDANCE FOR  IMAGE-TO-IMAGE TRANSLATION
Authors: Yu Lin, Yigong Wang, Yifan Li, Zhuoyi Wang, Yang Gao, Latifur Khan
Keywords: Image-to-Image translation, Attention Learning, GAN
TL;DR: A general method that improves the image translation performance of GAN framework by using an attention embedded discriminator
Abstract: Recently, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and numbers of its variants have been widely used to solve the image-to-image translation problem and achieved extraordinary results in both a supervised and unsupervised manner. However, most GAN-based methods suffer from the imbalance problem between the generator and discriminator in practice. Namely, the relative model capacities of the generator and discriminator do not match, leading to mode collapse and/or diminished gradients. To tackle this problem, we propose a GuideGAN based on attention mechanism. More specifically, we arm the discriminator with an attention mechanism so not only it estimates the probability that its input is real, but also does it create an attention map that highlights the critical features for such prediction. This attention map then assists the generator to produce more plausible and realistic images. We extensively evaluate the proposed GuideGAN framework on a  number of image transfer tasks. Both qualitative results and quantitative comparison demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach.