
Show HN: Ganvatar - Hacking StyleGAN to adjust age, gender, and emotion of faces - berkeleymalagon
https://ganvatar.com
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berkeleymalagon
Hey all,

Excited to share this demo with the HN.

All of the portraits in this demo are computer-generated by a machine learning
model called “StyleGAN”. While most of the recent excitement around StyleGAN
centers around its amazing ability to generate infinite variation (e.g.
thispersondoesnotexist.com <3), the emergent semantics encoded in the latent
space are impressive as well.

For instance, faces in this space allow for some semantic vector math,
reminiscent of word2vec’s “king - man + woman = queen”
([https://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-
why.html](https://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html)).

We can find the latent representations of, say, smiling people. We can then
average them and create a new semantic vector that, when added to pictures of
non-smiling faces, makes them all smile.

Play with the sliders to see what I mean.

Some possible applications: Generation of assets for games, Customizing ad
photography by region/demographics, Lifelike, custom avatars, Compression,
Modeling longitudinal medical imagery, Zero-shot inpainting, super-resolution,
etc.

Happy to answer any questions!

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axpence
Are there any commercial applications your team has discovered?

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berkeleymalagon
There's certainly latent demand for a platform that localizes ad photography,
although those customers are sensitive to weird artifacts in the generated
images. Likely non-trivial r&d investment there.

The clearest immediate opportunity for GANs is generating content where
artifacts might add value or are easily ignored (eg. art). The problem here is
there's very little tech moat for these businesses given how easy it is to
train a GAN. It'd come down to having a valuable, private dataset.

Lots of other potential commercial applications - we list some more on the
demo.

------
treblig
Berkeley, you're nuts. This is super cool.

~~~
berkeleymalagon
Thanks! It's been fun working on this with the team @psl

