NeurIPS 2020 Workshop

Last month, the deep learning powered online tool Toonify Yourself! Designed "for fun and amusement using deep learning and Generative Adversarial Networks," the system was developed by a pair of independent researchers, Justin N. M. Pinkney and Doron Adler, and let anyone change selfies or portraits into impressive animation-style images. Demand for the high-performance homemade model caused the site to crash, but it quickly returned thanks to support from user donations. In a paper submitted to the NeurIPS 2020 Machine Learning for Creativity and Design workshop, Pinkney and Adler present their research, which enables image generation in novel domains and with a degree of creative control on the output. The team's resolution dependant GAN interpolation method combines high resolution layers of an FFHQ model with low resolution layers from a model transferred to animated character faces to enable the combination of realistic facial textures with the structural characteristics of a cartoon. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are the current SOTA approach for many image synthesis and translation tasks.