Distilling Representations from GAN Generator via Squeeze and Span
This work addresses the challenge of transferring GAN representations to real-world applications, offering a method to enhance self-supervised learning, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the problem of leveraging GAN generator representations for downstream tasks by distilling knowledge via squeezing and spanning, achieving improved performance in self-supervised representation learning on real data.
In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been an actively studied topic and shown to successfully produce high-quality realistic images in various domains. The controllable synthesis ability of GAN generators suggests that they maintain informative, disentangled, and explainable image representations, but leveraging and transferring their representations to downstream tasks is largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose to distill knowledge from GAN generators by squeezing and spanning their representations. We squeeze the generator features into representations that are invariant to semantic-preserving transformations through a network before they are distilled into the student network. We span the distilled representation of the synthetic domain to the real domain by also using real training data to remedy the mode collapse of GANs and boost the student network performance in a real domain. Experiments justify the efficacy of our method and reveal its great significance in self-supervised representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/yangyu12/squeeze-and-span.