Alexander Sage

Alexander Sage, Eirikur Agustsson, Radu Timofte et al.

Designing a logo for a new brand is a lengthy and tedious back-and-forth process between a designer and a client. In this paper we explore to what extent machine learning can solve the creative task of the designer. For this, we build a dataset -- LLD -- of 600k+ logos crawled from the world wide web. Training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for logo synthesis on such multi-modal data is not straightforward and results in mode collapse for some state-of-the-art methods. We propose the use of synthetic labels obtained through clustering to disentangle and stabilize GAN training. We are able to generate a high diversity of plausible logos and we demonstrate latent space exploration techniques to ease the logo design task in an interactive manner. Moreover, we validate the proposed clustered GAN training on CIFAR 10, achieving state-of-the-art Inception scores when using synthetic labels obtained via clustering the features of an ImageNet classifier. GANs can cope with multi-modal data by means of synthetic labels achieved through clustering, and our results show the creative potential of such techniques for logo synthesis and manipulation. Our dataset and models will be made publicly available at https://data.vision.ee.ethz.ch/cvl/lld/.

Eirikur Agustsson, Alexander Sage, Radu Timofte et al.

Generative models such as Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are typically trained for a fixed prior distribution in the latent space, such as uniform or Gaussian. After a trained model is obtained, one can sample the Generator in various forms for exploration and understanding, such as interpolating between two samples, sampling in the vicinity of a sample or exploring differences between a pair of samples applied to a third sample. In this paper, we show that the latent space operations used in the literature so far induce a distribution mismatch between the resulting outputs and the prior distribution the model was trained on. To address this, we propose to use distribution matching transport maps to ensure that such latent space operations preserve the prior distribution, while minimally modifying the original operation. Our experimental results validate that the proposed operations give higher quality samples compared to the original operations.