Cited by 6,332Generative Adversarial Networks and Image SynthesisDigital Media Forensic DetectionAdvanced Neural Network Applications

Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN

Open access
Karras, Tero, Laine, Samuli, Aittala, Miika, Hellsten, Janne, Lehtinen, Jaakko, Aila, Timo·2020·2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

The style-based GAN architecture (StyleGAN) yields state-of-the-art results in data-driven unconditional generative image modeling. We expose and analyze several of its characteristic artifacts, and propose changes in both model architecture and training methods to address them. In particular, we redesign the generator normalization, revisit progressive growing, and regularize the generator to encourage good conditioning in the mapping from latent codes to images. In addition to improving image quality, this path length regularizer yields the additional benefit that the generator becomes significantly easier to invert. This makes it possible to reliably attribute a generated image to a particular network. We furthermore visualize how well the generator utilizes its output resolution, and identify a capacity problem, motivating us to train larger models for additional quality improvements. Overall, our improved model redefines the state of the art in unconditional image modeling, both in terms of existing distribution quality metrics as well as perceived image quality.

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Crossref · 10.1109/cvpr42600.2020.00813

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56 of 56 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • StyleGAN2 helps detect image deepfakes by determining whether a picture is generated by a network.

    “StyleGAN2 is also helping detect image deepfakes as it can see if the picture is generated by a network or not (Karras et al., 2020).”

    From Audio deepfakes: A survey (2023) · cites this paper as Karras et al., 2020

    Section 5.1 reports that StyleGAN2-generated images can be projected into its latent space and almost unambiguously attributed to the generating network. That supports identifying images made by StyleGAN2, but not the broader claim that StyleGAN2 determines whether any picture was generated by a network; the section discusses general fake-image detection as a separate task performed by classifiers. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • StyleGAN2 has exposed several typical artifacts of StyleGAN and has proposed changes in both model architecture and training methods to address them.

    “StyleGAN2 (Karras et al. 2020) has exposed several typical artifacts of StyleGAN and has proposed changes in both model architecture and training methods to address them.”

    From Countering Malicious DeepFakes: Survey, Battleground, and Horizon (2022) · cites this paper as Karras et al. 2020

  • In ForgeryNet, fake images are manipulated using 15 different manipulations while videos are manipulated using only 8 of them.

    “The fake images are manipulated using 15 different manipulations while the videos are manipulated using only 8 of them [27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36].”

    From On the Generalization of Deep Learning Models in Video Deepfake Detection (2023) · cites this paper as [30]

    Section 5.1, “Attribution of generated images,” discusses detecting and attributing GAN-generated images, but does not describe ForgeryNet. Searches for ForgeryNet, the 15 image manipulations, and the 8 video manipulations found no passage addressing those counts in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.76)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • LayerNorm prevents large magnitudes from appearing in specific regions of the latent space or reconstructed outputs.

    “LayerNorm) (Lei Ba et al., 2016) instead of Group Normalization (GroupNorm) (Wu and He, 2018), which prevents large magnitudes from appearing in specific regions of the latent space or reconstructed outputs (Karras et al., 2020; Sadat et al., 2024).”

    From Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI (2025) · cites this paper as Karras et al., 2020

    Section 2 describes localized spikes in StyleGAN feature maps and reports that redesigned normalization removes the resulting artifacts. It does not evaluate LayerNorm versus GroupNorm or say that LayerNorm prevents large magnitudes in latent-space regions or reconstructed outputs (searched: LayerNorm, layer normalization, GroupNorm, reconstructed outputs). (LLM, conf=0.75)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. [4]4. Christopher M. Bishop. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Springer, 2006. 17
  2. [15]15. G.H. Golub and C.F. Van Loan. Matrix Computations. Johns Hopkins Studies in the Mathematical Sciences. Johns Hop- kins University Press, 2013. 17
  3. [16]16. Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. Generative adversarial networks. In NIPS, 2014. 1, 5, 11
  4. [49]49. Richard Zhang. Making convolutional networks shift- invariant again. In Proc. ICML, 2019. 5, 11

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Authors
Karras, T., Laine, S., Aittala, M., Hellsten, J., Lehtinen, J., & Aila, T.
Affiliations
  • Nvidia (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • Aalto University (FI)
Venue
2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2020-06
Pages
8107-8116
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2995327724
Cited by
6,332
References
56
Citations by year
2026: 463 · 2025: 1070 · 2024: 1389 · 2023: 1362 · 2022: 1009 · 2021: 792 · 2020: 243 · 2019: 4
FWCI
262.37
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • TIB Data Manager
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Digital Media Forensic Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
StyleGAN, image quality, unconditional image generation, model capacity

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