Deliberation learning for image-to-image translation

Abstract

Image-to-image translation, which transfers an image from a source domain to a target one, has attracted much attention in both academia and industry. The major approach is to adopt an encoder-decoder based framework, where the encoder extracts features from the input image and then the decoder decodes the features and generates an image in the target domain as the output. In this paper, we go beyond this learning framework by considering an additional polishing step on the output image. Polishing an image is very common in human's daily life, such as editing and beautifying a photo in Photoshop after taking/generating it by a digital camera. Such a deliberation process is shown to be very helpful and important in practice and thus we believe it will also be helpful for image translation. Inspired by the success of deliberation network in natural language processing, we extend deliberation process to the field of image translation. We verify our proposed method on four two-domain translation tasks and one multi-domain translation task. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.