Head Rotation in Denoising Diffusion Models
Andrea Asperti Gabriele Colasuonno Antonio Guerra
Denoising Diffusion Models (DDM) are emerging as the cutting-edge technology
in the realm of deep generative modeling, challenging the dominance of
Generative Adversarial Networks. However, effectively exploring the latent
space's semantics and identifying compelling trajectories for manipulating and
editing important attributes of the generated samples remains challenging,
primarily due to the high-dimensional nature of the latent space. In this
study, we specifically concentrate on face rotation, which is known to be one
of the most intricate editing operations. By leveraging a recent embedding
technique for Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), we achieve, in many
cases, noteworthy manipulations encompassing a wide rotation angle of $\pm
30^o$, preserving the distinct characteristics of the individual. Our
methodology exploits the computation of trajectories approximating clouds of
latent representations of dataset samples with different yaw rotations through
linear regression. Specific trajectories are obtained by restricting the
analysis to subsets of data sharing significant attributes with the source
image. One of these attributes is the light provenance: a byproduct of our
research is a labeling of CelebA, categorizing images into three major groups
based on the illumination direction: left, center, and right.