Ludovica Schaerf

Ludovica Schaerf, Carina Popovici, Eric Postma

In recent years, Transformers, initially developed for language, have been successfully applied to visual tasks. Vision Transformers have been shown to push the state-of-the-art in a wide range of tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. While ample research has shown promising results in art attribution and art authentication tasks using Convolutional Neural Networks, this paper examines if the superiority of Vision Transformers extends to art authentication, improving, thus, the reliability of computer-based authentication of artworks. Using a carefully compiled dataset of authentic paintings by Vincent van Gogh and two contrast datasets, we compare the art authentication performances of Swin Transformers with those of EfficientNet. Using a standard contrast set containing imitations and proxies (works by painters with styles closely related to van Gogh), we find that EfficientNet achieves the best performance overall. With a contrast set that only consists of imitations, we find the Swin Transformer to be superior to EfficientNet by achieving an authentication accuracy of over 85%. These results lead us to conclude that Vision Transformers represent a strong and promising contender in art authentication, particularly in enhancing the computer-based ability to detect artistic imitations.

Ludovica Schaerf, Andrea Alfarano, Eric Postma

Colorway creation is the task of generating textile samples in alternate color variations maintaining an underlying pattern. The individuation of a suitable color palette for a colorway is a complex creative task, responding to client and market needs, stylistic and cultural specifications, and mood. We introduce a modification of this task, the "generative colorway" creation, that includes minimal shape modifications, and propose a framework, "ColorwAI", to tackle this task using color disentanglement on StyleGAN and Diffusion. We introduce a variation of the InterfaceGAN method for supervised disentanglement, ShapleyVec. We use Shapley values to subselect a few dimensions of the detected latent direction. Moreover, we introduce a general framework to adopt common disentanglement methods on any architecture with a semantic latent space and test it on Diffusion and GANs. We interpret the color representations within the models' latent space. We find StyleGAN's W space to be the most aligned with human notions of color. Finally, we suggest that disentanglement can solicit a creative system for colorway creation, and evaluate it through expert questionnaires and creativity theory.

Ludovica Schaerf, Pepe Ballesteros, Valentine Bernasconi et al.

Art curatorial practice is characterized by the presentation of an art collection in a knowledgeable way. Machine processes are characterized by their capacity to manage and analyze large amounts of data. This paper envisages AI curation and audience interaction to explore the implications of contemporary machine learning models for the curatorial world. This project was developed for the occasion of the 2023 Helsinki Art Biennial, entitled New Directions May Emerge. We use the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) collection to re-imagine the city of Helsinki through the lens of machine perception. We use visual-textual models to place indoor artworks in public spaces, assigning fictional coordinates based on similarity scores. We transform the space that each artwork inhabits in the city by generating synthetic 360 art panoramas. We guide the generation estimating depth values from 360 panoramas at each artwork location, and machine-generated prompts of the artworks. The result of this project is an AI curation that places the artworks in their imagined physical space, blurring the lines of artwork, context, and machine perception. The work is virtually presented as a web-based installation on this link http://newlyformedcity.net/, where users can navigate an alternative version of the city while exploring and interacting with its cultural heritage at scale.

Johann Ostmeyer, Ludovica Schaerf, Pavel Buividovich et al.

Previous research has shown that Artificial Intelligence is capable of distinguishing between authentic paintings by a given artist and human-made forgeries with remarkable accuracy, provided sufficient training. However, with the limited amount of existing known forgeries, augmentation methods for forgery detection are highly desirable. In this work, we examine the potential of incorporating synthetic artworks into training datasets to enhance the performance of forgery detection. Our investigation focuses on paintings by Vincent van Gogh, for which we release the first dataset specialized for forgery detection. To reinforce our results, we conduct the same analyses on the artists Amedeo Modigliani and Raphael. We train a classifier to distinguish original artworks from forgeries. For this, we use human-made forgeries and imitations in the style of well-known artists and augment our training sets with images in a similar style generated by Stable Diffusion and StyleGAN. We find that the additional synthetic forgeries consistently improve the detection of human-made forgeries. In addition, we find that, in line with previous research, the inclusion of synthetic forgeries in the training also enables the detection of AI-generated forgeries, especially if created using a similar generator.

Ludovica Schaerf, Andrea Alfarano, Fabrizio Silvestri et al.

Recent advances in diffusion models for image generation have led to detailed examinations of several components within the U-Net architecture for image editing. While previous studies have focused on the bottleneck layer (h-space), cross-attention, self-attention, and decoding layers, the overall role of the skip connections of the U-Net itself has not been specifically addressed. We conduct thorough analyses on the role of the skip connections and find that the residual connections passed by the third encoder block carry most of the spatial information of the reconstructed image, splitting the content from the style, passed by the remaining stream in the opposed decoding layer. We show that injecting the representations from this block can be used for text-based editing, precise modifications, and style transfer. We compare our method, SkipInject, to state-of-the-art style transfer and image editing methods and demonstrate that our method obtains the best content alignment and optimal structural preservation tradeoff.

Ludovica Schaerf

This paper examines the evolving nature of internal representations in generative visual models, focusing on the conceptual and technical shift from GANs and VAEs to diffusion-based architectures. Drawing on Beatrice Fazi's account of synthesis as the amalgamation of distributed representations, we propose a distinction between "synthesis in a strict sense", where a compact latent space wholly determines the generative process, and "synthesis in a broad sense," which characterizes models whose representational labor is distributed across layers. Through close readings of model architectures and a targeted experimental setup that intervenes in layerwise representations, we show how diffusion models fragment the burden of representation and thereby challenge assumptions of unified internal space. By situating these findings within media theoretical frameworks and critically engaging with metaphors such as the latent space and the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, we argue for a reorientation of how generative AI is understood: not as a direct synthesis of content, but as an emergent configuration of specialized processes.