Generating faces with VAEs
Now that you have learned the theory of VAEs and have built one for MNIST, it is time to grow up, ditch the toy, and generate some serious stuff. We will use VAE to generate some faces. Let's get started! The code is in ch2_vae_faces.ipynb
. There are a few face datasets available for training:
- Celeb A (http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/CelebA.html). This is a popular dataset in academia as it contains annotations of face attributes, but unfortunately it is not available for commercial use.
- Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset (FFHQ) (https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset). This dataset is freely available for commercial use and contains high-resolution images.
In this exercise, we will only assume the dataset contains RGB images; feel free to use any dataset that suits your needs.
Network architecture
We reuse the MNIST VAE and training pipeline with some modifications given that the dataset is now different from MNIST. Feel free to reduce...