AnyFace++: A Unified Framework for Free-style Text-to-Face Synthesis and Manipulation

Human faces contain rich semantic information that could hardly be described without a large vocabulary and complex sentence patterns. However, most existing text-to-image synthesis methods could only generate meaningful results based on limited sentence templates with words contained in the training set, which heavily impairs the generalization ability of these models. In this paper, we define a novel ‘free-style’ text-to-face generation and manipulation problem, and propose an effective solution, named AnyFace++, which is applicable to a much wider range of open-world scenarios. The CLIP model is involved in AnyFace++ for learning an aligned language-vision feature space, which also expands the range of acceptable vocabulary as it is trained on a large-scale dataset. To further improve the granularity of semantic alignment between text and images, a memory module is incorporated to convert the description with arbitrary length, format, and modality into regularized latent embeddings representing discriminative attributes of the target face. Moreover, the diversity and semantic consistency of generation results are improved by a novel semi-supervised training scheme and a series of newly proposed objective functions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, AnyFace++ is capable of synthesizing and manipulating face images based on more flexible descriptions and producing realistic images with higher diversity.