Counterfactual image generation by disentangling data attributes with deep generative models

Deep generative models target to infer the underlying true data distribution, and it leads to a huge success in generating fake-but-realistic data. Regarding such a perspective, the data attributes can be a crucial factor in the data generation process since non-existent counterfactual samples can be generated by altering certain factors. For example, we can generate new portrait images by flipping the gender attribute or altering the hair color attributes. This paper proposes counterfactual disentangled variational autoencoder generative adversarial networks (CDVAE-GAN), specialized for data attribute level counterfactual data generation. The structure of the proposed CDVAE-GAN consists of variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks. Specifically, we adopt a Gaussian variational autoencoder to extract low-dimensional disentangled data features and auxiliary Bernoulli latent variables to model the data attributes separately. Also, we utilize a generative adversarial network to generate data with high fidelity. By enjoying the benefits of the variational autoencoder with the additional Bernoulli latent variables and the generative adversarial network, the proposed CDVAE-GAN can control the data attributes, and it enables producing counterfactual data. Our experimental result on the CelebA dataset qualitatively shows that the generated samples from CDVAE-GAN are realistic. Also, the quantitative results support that the proposed model can produce data that can deceive other machine learning classifiers with the altered data attributes.