No Arabic abstract
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces, are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and sculpt their favorite variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.The different sculpted facial vectors exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.
We propose a generative framework based on generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance facial attractiveness while preserving facial identity and high-fidelity. Given a portrait image as input, having applied gradient descent to recover a latent vector that this generative framework can use to synthesize an image resemble to the input image, beauty semantic editing manipulation on the corresponding recovered latent vector based on InterFaceGAN enables this framework to achieve facial image beautification. This paper compared our system with Beholder-GAN and our proposed result-enhanced version of Beholder-GAN. It turns out that our framework obtained state-of-art attractiveness enhancement results. The code is available at https://github.com/zoezhou1999/BeautifyBasedOnGAN.
The perception of facial beauty is a complex phenomenon depending on many, detailed and global facial features influencing each other. In the machine learning community this problem is typically tackled as a problem of supervised inference. However, it has been conjectured that this approach does not capture the complexity of the phenomenon. A recent original experiment (Iba~nez-Berganza et al., Scientific Reports 9, 8364, 2019) allowed different human subjects to navigate the face-space and ``sculpt their preferred modification of a reference facial portrait. Here we present an unsupervised inference study of the set of sculpted facial vectors in that experiment. We first infer minimal, interpretable, and faithful probabilistic models (through Maximum Entropy and artificial neural networks) of the preferred facial variations, that capture the origin of the observed inter-subject diversity in the sculpted faces. The application of such generative models to the supervised classification of the gender of the sculpting subjects, reveals an astonishingly high prediction accuracy. This result suggests that much relevant information regarding the subjects may influence (and be elicited from) her/his facial preference criteria, in agreement with the multiple motive theory of attractiveness proposed in previous works.
Facial attributes (e.g., age and attractiveness) estimation performance has been greatly improved by using convolutional neural networks. However, existing methods have an inconsistency between the training objectives and the evaluation metric, so they may be suboptimal. In addition, these methods always adopt image classification or face recognition models with a large amount of parameters, which carry expensive computation cost and storage overhead. In this paper, we firstly analyze the essential relationship between two state-of-the-art methods (Ranking-CNN and DLDL) and show that the Ranking method is in fact learning label distribution implicitly. This result thus firstly unifies two existing popular state-of-the-art methods into the DLDL framework. Second, in order to alleviate the inconsistency and reduce resource consumption, we design a lightweight network architecture and propose a unified framework which can jointly learn facial attribute distribution and regress attribute value. The effectiveness of our approach has been demonstrated on both facial age and attractiveness estimation tasks. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art results using the single model with 36$times$(6$times$) fewer parameters and 2.6$times$(2.1$times$) faster inference speed on facial age (attractiveness) estimation. Moreover, our method can achieve comparable results as the state-of-the-art even though the number of parameters is further reduced to 0.9M (3.8MB disk storage).
Task-based modeling with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) has emerged as a popular way to infer the computational function of different brain regions. These models are quantitatively assessed by comparing the low-dimensional neural representations of the model with the brain, for example using canonical correlation analysis (CCA). However, the nature of the detailed neurobiological inferences one can draw from such efforts remains elusive. For example, to what extent does training neural networks to solve common tasks uniquely determine the network dynamics, independent of modeling architectural choices? Or alternatively, are the learned dynamics highly sensitive to different model choices? Knowing the answer to these questions has strong implications for whether and how we should use task-based RNN modeling to understand brain dynamics. To address these foundational questions, we study populations of thousands of networks, with commonly used RNN architectures, trained to solve neuroscientifically motivated tasks and characterize their nonlinear dynamics. We find the geometry of the RNN representations can be highly sensitive to different network architectures, yielding a cautionary tale for measures of similarity that rely representational geometry, such as CCA. Moreover, we find that while the geometry of neural dynamics can vary greatly across architectures, the underlying computational scaffold---the topological structure of fixed points, transitions between them, limit cycles, and linearized dynamics---often appears universal across all architectures.
A companion paper introduces a nonlinear network with Hebbian excitatory (E) neurons that are reciprocally coupled with anti-Hebbian inhibitory (I) neurons and also receive Hebbian feedforward excitation from sensory (S) afferents. The present paper derives the network from two normative principles that are mathematically equivalent but conceptually different. The first principle formulates unsupervised learning as a constrained optimization problem: maximization of S-E correlations subject to a copositivity constraint on E-E correlations. A combination of Legendre and Lagrangian duality yields a zero-sum continuous game between excitatory and inhibitory connections that is solved by the neural network. The second principle defines a zero-sum game between E and I cells. E cells want to maximize S-E correlations and minimize E-I correlations, while I cells want to maximize I-E correlations and minimize power. The conflict between I and E objectives effectively forces the E cells to decorrelate from each other, although only incompletely. Legendre duality yields the neural network.