We propose a novel method for solving regression tasks using few-shot or weak supervision. At the core of our method is the fundamental observation that GANs are incredibly successful at encoding semantic information within their latent space, even in a completely unsupervised setting. For modern generative frameworks, this semantic encoding manifests as smooth, linear directions which affect image attributes in a disentangled manner. These directions have been widely used in GAN-based image editing. We show that such directions are not only linear, but that the magnitude of change induced on the respective attribute is approximately linear with respect to the distance traveled along them. By leveraging this observation, our method turns a pre-trained GAN into a regression model, using as few as two labeled samples. This enables solving regression tasks on datasets and attributes which are difficult to produce quality supervision for. Additionally, we show that the same latent-distances can be used to sort collections of images by the strength of given attributes, even in the absence of explicit supervision. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method can be applied across a wide range of domains, leverage multiple latent direction discovery frameworks, and achieve state-of-the-art results in few-shot and low-supervision settings, even when compared to methods designed to tackle a single task.

本文提出了一种新的利用少样本或弱监督方式解决回归任务的方法，该方法利用生成式对抗网络（GANs）的语义信息表征能力，实现了将预先训练好的 GANs 转化成回归模型的操作，并证明了其在众多数据集和领域上的高效性。

LARGE: 基于GAN语义的潜变量回归