Exploring Intra-class Variation Factors with Learnable Cluster Prompts for Semi-supervised Image Synthesis

Semi-supervised class-conditional image synthesis is typically performed by inferring and injecting class labels into a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The supervision in the form of class identity may be inadequate to model classes with diverse visual appearances. In this paper, we propose a Learnable Cluster Prompt-based GAN (LCP-GAN) to capture class-wise characteristics and intra-class variation factors with a broader source of supervision. To exploit partially labeled data, we perform soft partitioning on each class, and explore the possibility of associating intra-class clusters with learnable visual concepts in the feature space of a pre-trained language-vision model, e.g., CLIP. For class-conditional image generation, we design a cluster-conditional generator by injecting a combination of intra-class cluster label embeddings, and further incorporate a real-fake classification head on top of CLIP to distinguish real instances from the synthesized ones, conditioned on the learnable cluster prompts. This significantly strengthens the generator with more semantic language supervision. LCP-GAN not only possesses superior generation capability but also matches the performance of the fully supervised version of the base models: BigGAN and StyleGAN2-ADA, on multiple standard benchmarks. © 2023 IEEE.