
Generating faces of cats using Generative Adversarial Networks - gk1
https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/cats/
======
waqf
With this kind of task, how do you verify that you didn't just overfit and
start reproducing the input data?

~~~
kowdermeister
She's generating it from noise: [https://github.com/AlexiaJM/Deep-learning-
with-cats/blob/mas...](https://github.com/AlexiaJM/Deep-learning-with-
cats/blob/master/images/DCGAN_220epochs.gif)

Also, you could verify by writing unit tests with OpenCV to look for similar
sources. Since it's all headshots, it will find matches for sure, but it would
also find with human faces.

~~~
semiquaver
The neural network is starting from noise, but that's not the only input, it
was trained on [0] and I think it's arguable that the NN is "reproducing" the
images from its training dataset in some sense.

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150703060412/http://137.189.35...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150703060412/http://137.189.35.203/WebUI/CatDatabase/catData.html)

~~~
radarsat1
I think it's a very interesting question, of how can we measure when a neural
network is being creative? In fact, creativity is not obvious at all. It's
sort of an ill-posed question if you think about it. How can you verify that a
network is generating things that are not like what it was trained on, yet
are... like what it was trained on?

Are neural networks* forever relegated to the role of copying and
interpolation? Do the neural network weights form a kind of database?

* (I don't think this only applies to neural networks, but models in general)

There was one recent work trying to address this [1] but I'm not 100%
convinced and I think a lot more work is warranted in this area. A difficulty
is that it's not a purely technical problem, but also one of semantics and
interpretation. It's one that the "automatic musical accompaniment" community
and other digital arts communities have struggled with for decades, and it's
not resolved.

How do you know when a machine is being creative? It's not far from the moving
goalposts problem of general artificial intelligence. How do you know when a
machine is being intelligent, if you can always explain it away by examining
the black box?

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068)

~~~
zlynx
And likewise, how do you know when a human is being creative? Isn't all art
derivative of our training and influences? I believe something like that was
an argument by one of the random paint splatter artists: that randomness was
the only thing truly creative.

~~~
Pica_soO
Pollock?

~~~
Pica_soO
Why is Jason Pollock now offensive?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock)

Bunch of Avantgarde denialists!

If its not a painted photo, its not art? If i dont understand it, its not art?
If its meta its not art?

~~~
qb45
There is a popular conspiracy theory than _nobody_ actually understands it and
avantgarde artists are in fact con artists.

Not that I care enough to be offended, though.

And hell, if this is that "meta" meaning in their art, I must confess that I
haven't got the joke until now :)

------
threepipeproblm
I was expecting meows.

~~~
BinaryBullet
not meows, but here are some purrs: [https://purrli.com/](https://purrli.com/)

~~~
ovrdrv3
OP's post was amazing but can someone explain how this was probably made?

~~~
E6300
I think the sound is generated locally. Check out the page source, which
contains the JS I think is responsible for generation (I haven't checked in
detail).

------
Zenbit_UX
Wait, it's actually generating new cat faces as in cats that don't exist? Some
of those images looked like they had backgrounds in the corners was that also
generated???

~~~
robotresearcher
Yes.

------
Paul-ish
These things are always low resolution. At some point I'd like to see the
state of the art move into more realistic (say ~500x500) dimensions.

~~~
alexcnwy
I think it's in part due to the content loss piece being done using pre-
trained imagenet models which typically resize images to 224x224...

~~~
gwern
That's not it. It's easy to scale a larger image down to 224x224 and feed it
into a checkpoint. And a lot of these GANs don't use such content losses in
the first place because it adds complexity and makes it harder to use (have to
get one of those pretrained models in the first place).

------
nilkn
What are some potential applications of this outside of toy problems like cat
pictures?

~~~
6502nerdface
Generating convincing profile pictures for thousands of fake social media
accounts.

Or photo portraits of the "board members" for the About Us page of an
autonomous corporation.

------
leeoniya
welp, that's terrifying.

------
baybal2
A dream of cat video clickfarmers came true

------
lostgame
Change the title? Seems like I wasn't the only one expecting some sort of
audio-related thing.

~~~
ChristianBundy
Yeah, I put on headphones for this. Seems like a cat generator.

~~~
aleju
I would assume that the name was chosen, because I already have an old project
online called "cat generator" [0], which used the same underlying technique
(GANs), dataset and landmark-based normalization. Reusing the name would have
resulted in confusion.

[0] [https://github.com/aleju/cat-generator](https://github.com/aleju/cat-
generator)

~~~
dschu
Yet another cat generator then (:

------
bluetwo
Still no cure for cancer.

~~~
itg
If that's what you're interested, a quick google search will show you plenty
of startups/companies applying machine learning/deep learning to medicine.

~~~
bluetwo
It's just a saying.

Usually said after someone shows off a highly complicated technology with no
practical purpose.

------
dboreham
Read that as "Generating the feces of cats.." which would have been altogether
more interesting a problem.

