Controlling biases and diversity in diverse image-to-image translation
Pith reviewed 2026-05-24 17:42 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Semantic constraints reduce unwanted biases in diverse image-to-image translation.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
By imposing semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties, the model produces translations with fewer unwanted changes while still performing the wanted transformation, serving as a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation.
What carries the argument
Semantic constraints that enforce preservation of desired image properties while sampling different style codes in a disentangled content-style latent space.
Load-bearing premise
That the observed biases arise primarily from the visual distribution of the target domain and that semantic constraints can be imposed without degrading translation quality or diversity.
What would settle it
A quantitative test on the face datasets in which the constrained model still produces measurable gender or race shifts at rates comparable to the unconstrained baseline would falsify the claim that the constraints successfully limit unwanted changes.
Figures
read the original abstract
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper addresses the problem of bias in diverse unpaired image-to-image translation (DIT), where target-domain statistics can induce unwanted attribute changes (e.g., gender or race in face images). It proposes adding semantic constraints to existing disentanglement-based DIT models to enforce preservation of desired properties, yielding a model for unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT) that reduces such changes while retaining the intended translation and output diversity. The abstract states that experiments on multiple heavily biased datasets across faces, objects, and scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Significance. If the semantic-constraint mechanism can be shown to measurably reduce unwanted attribute shifts without loss of translation fidelity or diversity, the work would provide a practical extension of disentanglement techniques that directly targets fairness issues in generative vision models. The absence of any reported metrics, however, prevents evaluation of whether the central claim holds.
major comments (1)
- [Abstract] Abstract: the claim that 'experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques' supplies no quantitative results, ablation studies, error analysis, or even example metrics (e.g., attribute classification accuracy before/after, diversity scores such as LPIPS, or FID). Without such evidence the data-to-claim link cannot be assessed and the central assertion that unwanted changes are reduced while wanted transformations and diversity are preserved remains unevaluated.
minor comments (1)
- [Abstract] Abstract: the acronym 'UDIT' is introduced before its expansion ('unbiased diverse image-to-image translation') is given, which is a minor clarity issue.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the detailed review and constructive feedback. We address the major comment below and will revise the manuscript accordingly to strengthen the presentation of our results.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the claim that 'experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques' supplies no quantitative results, ablation studies, error analysis, or even example metrics (e.g., attribute classification accuracy before/after, diversity scores such as LPIPS, or FID). Without such evidence the data-to-claim link cannot be assessed and the central assertion that unwanted changes are reduced while wanted transformations and diversity are preserved remains unevaluated.
Authors: We agree that the abstract would be strengthened by including key quantitative metrics. The full manuscript reports attribute classification accuracies (to quantify reduction in unwanted bias-induced changes), LPIPS scores (for diversity), and FID (for translation quality) in the experiments section across the evaluated datasets. We will revise the abstract to explicitly cite representative results (e.g., X% reduction in attribute shift with no loss in LPIPS or FID) while preserving the overall length and readability. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No significant circularity detected
full rationale
The paper proposes extending existing diverse I2I translation frameworks (e.g., via disentanglement of content/style) with an added semantic constraint term to reduce unwanted attribute shifts induced by target-domain statistics. The central claim rests on experimental validation across biased datasets rather than any closed-form derivation, fitted parameter renamed as prediction, or self-citation chain. No equations, uniqueness theorems, or ansatzes are described that reduce the method to its inputs by construction; the approach is presented as an empirical extension with external constraints, consistent with the reader's assessment of score 1.0.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Almahairi, A., Rajeswar, S., Sordoni, A., Bachman, P., Courville, A., 2018. Augmented cyclegan: Learning many-to- many mappings from unpaired data, in: International Confer- ence on Machine Learning
work page 2018
-
[2]
Segnet: A deep convolutional encoder-decoder architecture for image segmentation
Badrinarayanan, V., Kendall, A., Cipolla, R., 2017. Segnet: A deep convolutional encoder-decoder architecture for image segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Ma- chine Intelligence
work page 2017
-
[3]
Representation learning: A review and new perspectives
Bengio, Y., Courville, A., Vincent, P., 2013. Representation learning: A review and new perspectives. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
work page 2013
-
[4]
Pros and cons of gan evaluation measures
Borji, A., 2019. Pros and cons of gan evaluation measures. Computer Vision and Image Understanding 179, 41–65. 11 Fig. 11: Robustness to bias on Biased handbags. Fig. 12: Example translations for Handbags-texture (left) and Handbags-color (right). Better viewed electronically, zoom might be necessary to appreciate the changes in texture
work page 2019
-
[5]
Bousmalis, K., Silberman, N., Dohan, D., Erhan, D., Krishnan, D., 2017. Unsupervised pixel-level domain adaptation with gen- erative adversarial networks, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Con- ference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
work page 2017
-
[6]
Domain separation networks, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Bousmalis, K., Trigeorgis, G., Silberman, N., Krishnan, D., Er- han, D., 2016. Domain separation networks, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
work page 2016
-
[7]
Learn to synthesize and synthesize to learn
Bozorgtabar, B., Rad, M.S., Ekenel, H.K., Thiran, J.P., 2019. Learn to synthesize and synthesize to learn. Computer Vision and Image Understanding
work page 2019
-
[8]
Buolamwini, J., Gebru, T., 2018. Gender shades: Intersec- tional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification, in: Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, pp. 77–91
work page 2018
-
[9]
Chen, X., Duan, Y., Houthooft, R., Schulman, J., Sutskever, I., Abbeel, P., 2016. Infogan: Interpretable representation learn- ing by information maximizing generative adversarial nets, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
work page 2016
-
[10]
Cordts, M., Omran, M., Ramos, S., Rehfeld, T., Enzweiler, M., Benenson, R., Franke, U., Roth, S., Schiele, B., 2016. The cityscapes dataset for semantic urban scene understanding, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
work page 2016
-
[11]
Frustratingly easy domain adaptation
Daum´ e III, H., 2007. Frustratingly easy domain adaptation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Com- putational Linguistics
work page 2007
-
[12]
Fang, C., Xu, Y., Rockmore, D.N., 2013. Unbiased metric learn- ing: On the utilization of multiple datasets and web images for softening bias, in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 1657–1664
work page 2013
-
[13]
Ganin, Y., Lempitsky, V., 2015. Unsupervised domain adapta- tion by backpropagation, in: International Conference on Ma- chine Learning
work page 2015
-
[14]
Gonzalez-Garcia, A., van de Weijer, J., Bengio, Y., 2018. Image- to-image translation for cross-domain disentanglement, in: Ad- vances in Neural Information Processing Systems
work page 2018
-
[15]
Generative adversarial nets, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde- Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., Bengio, Y., 2014. Generative adversarial nets, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
work page 2014
-
[16]
Hendricks, L.A., Burns, K., Saenko, K., Darrell, T., Rohrbach, A., 2018. Women also snowboard: Overcoming bias in cap- tioning models, in: Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision, Springer. pp. 793–811
work page 2018
-
[17]
Herranz, L., Jiang, S., Li, X., 2016. Scene recognition with cnns: objects, scales and dataset bias, in: Proceedings of the IEEE 12 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 571–579
work page 2016
-
[18]
Howard, A., Zhang, C., Horvitz, E., 2017. Addressing bias in machine learning algorithms: A pilot study on emotion recog- nition for intelligent systems, in: 2017 IEEE Workshop on Ad- vanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO), IEEE. pp. 1–7
work page 2017
-
[19]
Multimodal unsupervised image-to-image translation
Huang, X., Liu, M.Y., Belongie, S., Kautz, J., 2018. Multimodal unsupervised image-to-image translation. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision
work page 2018
-
[20]
Isola, P., Zhu, J.Y., Zhou, T., Efros, A.A., 2017. Image-to-image translation with conditional adversarial networks, in: Proceed- ings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
work page 2017
-
[21]
Identifying and Correcting Label Bias in Machine Learning
Jiang, H., Nachum, O., 2019. Identifying and correcting label bias in machine learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.04966
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2019
-
[22]
Khosla, A., Zhou, T., Malisiewicz, T., Efros, A.A., Torralba, A., 2012. Undoing the damage of dataset bias, in: Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision, Springer. pp. 158–171
work page 2012
-
[23]
Learning to discover cross-domain relations with generative adversarial networks
Kim, T., Cha, M., Kim, H., Lee, J.K., Kim, J., 2017. Learning to discover cross-domain relations with generative adversarial networks. International Conference on Machine Learning
work page 2017
-
[24]
Lee, H.Y., Tseng, H.Y., Huang, J.B., Singh, M., Yang, M.H.,
-
[25]
Proceedings of the European Conference on Com- puter Vision
Diverse image-to-image translation via disentangled rep- resentations. Proceedings of the European Conference on Com- puter Vision
-
[26]
Automotive radar and camera fusion using generative adversarial networks
Lekic, V., Babic, Z., 2019. Automotive radar and camera fusion using generative adversarial networks. Computer Vision and Image Understanding doi: 10.1016/j.cviu.2019.04.002
-
[27]
Levi, G., Hassner, T., 2015. Age and gender classification us- ing convolutional neural networks, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Work- shops, pp. 34–42
work page 2015
-
[28]
Liu, M.Y., Breuel, T., Kautz, J., 2017. Unsupervised image-to- image translation networks, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 700–708
work page 2017
-
[29]
Exploiting unlabeled data in cnns by self-supervised learning to rank
Liu, X., Van De Weijer, J., Bagdanov, A.D., 2019. Exploiting unlabeled data in cnns by self-supervised learning to rank. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 41, 1862–1878
work page 2019
-
[30]
Liu, Y.C., Yeh, Y.Y., Fu, T.C., Wang, S.D., Chiu, W.C., Wang, Y.C.F., 2018. Detach and adapt: Learning cross-domain disen- tangled deep representation, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Con- ference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
work page 2018
-
[31]
Mathieu, M.F., Zhao, J.J., Zhao, J., Ramesh, A., Sprechmann, P., LeCun, Y., 2016. Disentangling factors of variation in deep representation using adversarial training, in: Advances in Neu- ral Information Processing Systems
work page 2016
-
[32]
Deep face recognition, in: Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Con- ference
Parkhi, O.M., Vedaldi, A., Zisserman, A., 2015. Deep face recognition, in: Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Con- ference
work page 2015
-
[33]
Visual domain adaptation: A survey of recent advances
Patel, V.M., Gopalan, R., Li, R., Chellappa, R., 2015. Visual domain adaptation: A survey of recent advances. IEEE signal processing magazine 32, 53–69
work page 2015
-
[34]
Reed, S., Sohn, K., Zhang, Y., Lee, H., 2014. Learning to disentangle factors of variation with manifold interaction, in: International Conference on Machine Learning
work page 2014
-
[35]
Deep visual analogy-making, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Reed, S.E., Zhang, Y., Zhang, Y., Lee, H., 2015. Deep visual analogy-making, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
work page 2015
-
[36]
Ricanek, K., Tesafaye, T., 2006. Morph: A longitudinal image database of normal adult age-progression, in: Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, 2006. FGR 2006. 7th International Conference on, IEEE. pp. 341–345
work page 2006
-
[37]
Ros, G., Sellart, L., Materzynska, J., Vazquez, D., Lopez, A.M.,
- [38]
-
[39]
Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge
Russakovsky, O., Deng, J., Su, H., Krause, J., Satheesh, S., Ma, S., Huang, Z., Karpathy, A., Khosla, A., Bernstein, M., et al., 2015. Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge. International Journal of Computer Vision 115, 211–252
work page 2015
-
[40]
Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition
Simonyan, K., Zisserman, A., 2014. Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2014
-
[41]
Taigman, Y., Polyak, A., Wolf, L., 2017. Unsupervised cross- domain image generation, in: International Conference on Learning Representations
work page 2017
-
[42]
Taigman, Y., Yang, M., Ranzato, M., Wolf, L., 2014. Deepface: Closing the gap to human-level performance in face verification, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1701–1708
work page 2014
-
[43]
Torralba, A., Efros, A.A., 2011. Unbiased look at dataset bias, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE. pp. 1521–1528
work page 2011
-
[44]
Wang, Y., van de Weijer, J., Herranz, L., 2018. Mix and match networks: encoder-decoder alignment for zero-pair image trans- lation, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
work page 2018
-
[45]
Yi, Z., Zhang, H.R., Tan, P., Gong, M., 2017. Dualgan: Unsu- pervised dual learning for image-to-image translation., in: Pro- ceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 2868–2876
work page 2017
-
[46]
Bdd100k: A diverse driving video database with scalable annotation tooling
Yu, F., Xian, W., Chen, Y., Liu, F., Liao, M., Madhavan, V., Darrell, T., 2018a. Bdd100k: A diverse driving video database with scalable annotation tooling. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision
-
[47]
Yu, L., Cheng, Y., van de Weijer, J., 2018b. Weakly supervised domain-specific color naming based on attention, in: Proceed- ings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, IEEE. pp. 3019–3024
-
[48]
Synthetic data generation for end-to- end thermal infrared tracking
Zhang, L., Gonzalez-Garcia, A., van de Weijer, J., Danelljan, M., Khan, F.S., 2018a. Synthetic data generation for end-to- end thermal infrared tracking. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 28, 1837–1850
-
[49]
Zhang, R., Isola, P., Efros, A.A., Shechtman, E., Wang, O., 2018b. The unreasonable effectiveness of deep networks as a perceptual metric, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
-
[50]
Zhao, S., Ren, H., Yuan, A., Song, J., Goodman, N., Ermon, S., 2018. Bias and generalization in deep generative models: An empirical study, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 10815–10824
work page 2018
-
[51]
Zhu, J.Y., Park, T., Isola, P., Efros, A.A., 2017a. Unpaired image-to-image translation using cycle-consistent adversarial networks, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
-
[52]
Zhu, J.Y., Zhang, R., Pathak, D., Darrell, T., Efros, A.A., Wang, O., Shechtman, E., 2017b. Toward multimodal image- to-image translation, in: Advances in Neural Information Pro- cessing Systems, pp. 465–476
-
[53]
Ai can be sexist and racistits time to make it fair
Zou, J., Schiebinger, L., 2018. Ai can be sexist and racistits time to make it fair. 13 Appendix Tables 6-10 show the architectures of the content en- coder, style encoder, image decoder and discriminator used in the cross-modal experiment. The used abbreviations are shown in Table 11. Layer Input →Output Kernel, stride, padconv1 [4,128, 128,3]→[4,128, 12...
work page 2018
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.