  We propose a novel approach for multi-modal Image-to-image (I2I) translation.
To tackle the one-to-many relationship between input and output domains,
previous works use complex training objectives to learn a latent embedding,
jointly with the generator, that models the variability of the output domain.
In contrast, we directly model the style variability of images, independent of
the image synthesis task. Specifically, we pre-train a generic style encoder
using a novel proxy task to learn an embedding of images, from arbitrary
domains, into a low-dimensional style latent space. The learned latent space
introduces several advantages over previous traditional approaches to
multi-modal I2I translation. First, it is not dependent on the target dataset,
and generalizes well across multiple domains. Second, it learns a more powerful
and expressive latent space, which improves the fidelity of style capture and
transfer. The proposed style pre-training also simplifies the training
objective and speeds up the training significantly. Furthermore, we provide a
detailed study of the contribution of different loss terms to the task of
multi-modal I2I translation, and propose a simple alternative to VAEs to enable
sampling from unconstrained latent spaces. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art
results on six challenging benchmarks with a simple training objective that
includes only a GAN loss and a reconstruction loss.
