Generating faces of cats using Generative Adversarial Networks

Also, you could verify by writing unit tests with OpenCV to look for similar sources. Since it's all headshots, it will find matches for sure, but it would also find with human faces.

semiquaver• 9 years ago

The neural network is starting from noise, but that's not the only input, it was trained on [0] and I think it's arguable that the NN is "reproducing" the images from its training dataset in some sense.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150703060412/http://137.189.35...

exabrial• 9 years ago

Similar thoughts: How do I verify what I read isn't just technobabble haha. I don't think I understood much of it

E63003• 9 years ago

Yeah, I would have at least ran some kind of similarity search on the output. Without that check it's impossible to know if this is actually doing anything.

lostgame• 9 years ago

Change the title? Seems like I wasn't the only one expecting some sort of audio-related thing.

ChristianBundy• 9 years ago

Yeah, I put on headphones for this. Seems like a cat generator.

aleju• 9 years ago

I would assume that the name was chosen, because I already have an old project online called "cat generator" [0], which used the same underlying technique (GANs), dataset and landmark-based normalization. Reusing the name would have resulted in confusion.

[0] https://github.com/aleju/cat-generator

sctb• 9 years ago

Alright, we've updated the title from “Meow Generator”.

Zenbit_UX• 9 years ago

Wait, it's actually generating new cat faces as in cats that don't exist? Some of those images looked like they had backgrounds in the corners was that also generated???

robotresearcher• 9 years ago

Yes.

leeoniya• 9 years ago

welp, that's terrifying.

bluetwo2• 9 years ago

Still no cure for cancer.

itg• 9 years ago

If that's what you're interested, a quick google search will show you plenty of startups/companies applying machine learning/deep learning to medicine.

bluetwo2• 9 years ago

It's just a saying.

Usually said after someone shows off a highly complicated technology with no practical purpose.

baybal2• 9 years ago

A dream of cat video clickfarmers came true

dboreham• 9 years ago

Read that as "Generating the feces of cats.." which would have been altogether more interesting a problem.

Paul-ish• 9 years ago

These things are always low resolution. At some point I'd like to see the state of the art move into more realistic (say ~500x500) dimensions.

alexcnwy• 9 years ago

I think it's in part due to the content loss piece being done using pre-trained imagenet models which typically resize images to 224x224...

gwern2• 9 years ago

That's not it. It's easy to scale a larger image down to 224x224 and feed it into a checkpoint. And a lot of these GANs don't use such content losses in the first place because it adds complexity and makes it harder to use (have to get one of those pretrained models in the first place).

gwern2• 9 years ago

It's a combination of GPU RAM, slowdowns (remember it's squared in dimensions), and stability (larger is more unstable end-to-end). Arguably, state of the art in image synthesis is DeepMind's PixelCNN: "Parallel Multiscale Autoregressive Density Estimation" https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03664 , Reed et al 2017: generating 512px photorealistic images & video with PixelCNNs rather than GANs. Also good is StackGAN which does ~200x200ish but there's no reason it couldn't go up to 500x500 (just pop in a third upscaling stage).

There's far more work on GANs than PixelCNNs (see the https://github.com/hindupuravinash/the-gan-zoo ) but at least thus far, I haven't seen any GANs which appear visually competitive with Reed et al 2017's PixelCNN samples. Downside - code has not been released by DeepMind[], and you can't do CycleGAN or other stupid GAN tricks with PixelCNN AFAIK. CycleGAN is absolutely hilarious, if you haven't seen all the uses of it yet, much more interesting than generating cat faces.

[] I asked way back when and Reed said he'd try but nothing yet.

nilkn• 9 years ago

What are some potential applications of this outside of toy problems like cat pictures?

6502nerdface• 9 years ago

Generating convincing profile pictures for thousands of fake social media accounts.

Or photo portraits of the "board members" for the About Us page of an autonomous corporation.

clock_tower• 9 years ago

I expect it could stretch a game's art budget considerably, FWIW...

Jack000• 9 years ago

generating tween frames for animation

Generating faces of cats using Generative Adversarial Networks

Related Stories