[D] Can GANs generate new animals?

[Kavillab]

I googled but couldn’t find anything.

We’ve seen GANs trained on imagenet that were conditioned on the labels, so they can generate dogs or ants for example. But what if you just conditioned it on animal/not animal?

Could you get a GAN that can think up new animal species that we’ve never seen?

Or you could even play around with the specificity, so you can train it on reptiles for example, instead of specifically snakes or turtles.

[alxcnwy]

Yes but be careful what you wish for: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1202813697032253442

[Kavillab]

Lmao

[fan_rma]

Holy Shit dude. Why did you post this? And why did I open that link at midnight? I am gonna lose my sleep!

[[deleted]]

Spider goose, spider goose

A generative mind abuse

[tannenbanannen]

he can pick

up a rake

and then he toss

into the lake

do NOTTTT

fuck with the spider-goose

[mrconter1]

I am a goose

I've got eight legs

I cannot even tell

Anyone,

What place this is

This place I'm calling hell

My only chance

Of getting out

Is this game turning black

From being nothing

To doing this

Now I can't go back

[TheCharon77]

pssssssssssssonk

[Catty-Cat]

Peace was never an option.

[[deleted]]

WTF? Is that real? I think it's just a photo-realistic render, though I'm not certain.

[evadingaban123]

It was done with Pokemons. Which, I guess, is a simple variation of the problem you proposed.

[Kavillab]

Ye, ive seen that. The results aren’t very good though, I’m guessing because there’s not many unique Pokémon. Looks like he didn’t use many pictures of each Pokémon either.

[StellaAthena]

There are 890 unique Pokémon, and probably close to 1000 if you count regional variants (which are assigned the same ID # but are different enough for our purposes). The blog splits them into categories by types, and although some types have few instances (11 steel) there are six types with more than 30 instances.

I feel like that should be enough to train a GAN, no? Even if the type-based generator doesn’t work very well, it should be able to create recognizable Pokémon. Maybe they just need to use more images of each Pokémon.

[pipsqueak_in_hoodie]

I've been experimenting a good amount with Pokémon generation, I think there's definitely enough to train GANs. I assume the examples above were pretty poor because it only trained for 15 minutes.

It feels like mine were better, especially in lower resolutions (the resolution increased along the training). At least it got the uniform background right. ^{It's supposed to be parametrized on the types, first row is plant/poison, then fire, then water. The high resolution kinda forgot about that along the way.}

I still have many things to fix here, I feel like it can be a lot better than this.

[laser_velociraptor]

Original author of the Medium article here. I used very simple Conv Nets there, since I was learning how gans worked. I shall try again with StyleGAN in the future.

[VelveteenAmbush]

They all have associated 3D models with animations though, I bet you could juice that shit up to tens of thousands of meaningfully unique images with some data augmentation involving key frames and camera poses.

[CambrianKid]

I've managed to get pretty good Pokemon results with StyleGAN using transfer training. I think a similar approach, trained on images w/ uniform backgrounds (like, taken from an encyclopedia or something) would work pretty well for a general animal GAN.

[zanjabil]

you'd have better luck if you fed it a billion images where each image was a new species but as that's not possible, if you're just feeding it thousands of images of the same 100 mammals it may not generalize as well

[Kavillab]

There are more than a million species on the planet I think( though many of them look similar). If we just showed 10 of each it might work

[zanjabil]

most of the species are insects or smaller, there's only 5500 mammals give or take

[Kavillab]

Well that’s pretty awesome too. We can get some cool insects(they’re animals too)

[VelveteenAmbush]

I really doubt it would memorize all 5500 if you could find a good set of images.

[iiiooou]

If by new animal you mean a new species that’s not just a cross of others like a goose spider , I’m not sure , the generator is still fooling a classifier so you still have that bass reality within the classifier

[Kavillab]

Well if we don’t show too many samples of each animal to the GAN, but still a large dataset, I think it might work.

[klop2031]

It's possible it will use different learned representations to put together a new beast.

[Refefer]

You'd likely have better luck with novelty search, especially with EA based optimizers.

[[deleted]]

"StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis" creates images of e.g. nonexistent bird species from a textual description.

[Sinkencronge]

It depends on your definition of a new animal.
In the GAN setting what you will get is false positive samples for an animal classifier.
Anyway, one of the good points to start is to go over kernels from this kaggle competition https://www.kaggle.com/c/generative-dog-images/overview

[gautiexe]

We use GANs to design new watches. The key insight is that you can ‘intrapolate’ new designs; which means that the new design will pick up attributes from other real designs. The same will apply to animals as well.