Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs via Correlation Analysis for Controllable Concept Manipulation

Generative adversarial nets (GANs) have been successfully applied in many fields like image generation, inpainting, super-resolution, and drug discovery, etc. By now, the inner process of GANs is far from being understood. To get a deeper insight into the intrinsic mechanism of GANs, in this paper, a method for interpreting the latent space of GANs by analyzing the correlation between latent variables and the corresponding semantic contents in generated images is proposed. Unlike previous methods that focus on dissecting models via feature visualization, the emphasis of this work is put on the variables in latent space, i.e. how the latent variables affect the quantitative analysis of generated results. Given a pre-trained GAN model with weights fixed, the latent variables are intervened to analyze their effect on the semantic content in generated images. A set of controlling latent variables can be derived for specific content generation, and the controllable semantic content manipulation is achieved. The proposed method is testified on the datasets Fashion-MNIST and UT Zappos50K, experiment results show its effectiveness.