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In this work, we show that highly-structured semantic hierarchy emerges as variation factors from synthesizing scenes from the generative representations in state-of-the-art GAN models, like StyleGAN and BigGAN. By probing the layer-wise representations with a broad set of semantics at different abstraction levels, we are able to quantify the causality between the activations and semantics occurring in the output image. Such a quantification identifies the human-understandable variation factors learned by GANs to compose scenes. The qualitative and quantitative results further suggest that the generative representations learned by the GANs with layer-wise latent codes are specialized to synthesize different hierarchical semantics: the early layers tend to determine the spatial layout and configuration, the middle layers control the categorical objects, and the later layers finally render the scene attributes as well as color scheme. Identifying such a set of manipulatable latent variation factors facilitates semantic scene manipulation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09267v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.09267v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"semantic-hierarchy-emerges-in-deep-generative","repo_url":"https://github.com/ShenYujun/HiGAN","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"paper_slug":"semantic-hierarchy-emerges-in-deep-generative","repo_url":"https://github.com/genforce/higan","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"adaptive-instance-normalization","method_name":"Adaptive Instance Normalization"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"biggan","method_name":"BigGAN"},{"method_slug":"conditional-batch-normalization","method_name":"Conditional Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"early-stopping","method_name":"Early Stopping"},{"method_slug":"feedforward-network","method_name":"Feedforward Network"},{"method_slug":"gan-hinge-loss","method_name":"GAN Hinge Loss"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"non-local-block","method_name":"Non-Local Block"},{"method_slug":"non-local-operation","method_name":"Non-Local Operation"},{"method_slug":"off-diagonal-orthogonal-regularization","method_name":"Off-Diagonal Orthogonal Regularization"},{"method_slug":"projection-discriminator","method_name":"Projection Discriminator"},{"method_slug":"r1-regularization","method_name":"R1 Regularization"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sagan","method_name":"SAGAN"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"spectral-normalization","method_name":"Spectral Normalization"},{"method_slug":"stylegan","method_name":"StyleGAN"},{"method_slug":"ttur","method_name":"TTUR"},{"method_slug":"truncation-trick","method_name":"Truncation Trick"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1911.09267","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1911.09267"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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