Recent deep generative models are able to provide photo-realistic images as well as visual or textual content embeddings useful to address various tasks of computer vision and natural language processing. Their usefulness is nevertheless often limited by the lack of control over the generative process or the poor understanding of the learned representation. To overcome these major issues, very recent work has shown the interest of studying the semantics of the latent space of generative models. In this paper, we propose to advance on the interpretability of the latent space of generative models by introducing a new method to find meaningful directions in the latent space of any generative model along which we can move to control precisely specific properties of the generated image like the position or scale of the object in the image. Our method does not require human annotations and is particularly well suited for the search of directions encoding simple transformations of the generated image, such as translation, zoom or color variations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method qualitatively and quantitatively, both for GANs and variational auto-encoders.

本文提出了一种新的方法，通过找到生成模型中有意义的方向来提高生成模型潜在空间的可解释性，从而精确地控制生成图像的特定属性，如位置或比例。该方法对于搜索编码生成图像的简单变换方向（如平移，缩放或颜色变化）特别适用，并在GAN和变分自动编码器模型的质量和量化方面得到了证明。

通过连续变异因素控制生成模型