Papers › Mask-Guided Discovery of Semantic Manifolds in Generative Models
Mask-Guided Discovery of Semantic Manifolds in Generative Models
Mengyu Yang, David Rokeby, Xavier Snelgrove
Advances in the realm of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have led to architectures capable of producing amazingly realistic images such as StyleGAN2, which, when trained on the FFHQ dataset, generates images of human faces from random vectors in a lower-dimensional latent space. Unfortunately, this space is entangled - translating a latent vector along its axes does not correspond to a meaningful transformation in the output space (e.g., smiling mouth, squinting eyes). The model behaves as a black box, providing neither control over its output nor insight into the structures it has learned from the data. We present a method to explore the manifolds of changes of spatially localized regions of the face. Our method discovers smoothly varying sequences of latent vectors along these manifolds suitable for creating animations. Unlike existing disentanglement methods that either require labelled data or explicitly alter internal model parameters, our method is an optimization-based approach guided by a custom loss function and manually defined region of change. Our code is open-sourced, which can be found, along with supplementary results, on our project page: https://github.com/bmolab/masked-gan-manifold
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections