Visual search and discovery via generative model inversion

Abstract

Solutions for visual search and discovery include performing unsupervised training of a generative adversarial network that has a generator and an assessor. Training the generative adversarial network involves alternating training the assessor with the generator and a plurality of catalog images with training the generator with the assessor. The catalog images are inverted into catalog vectors by leveraging the trained generator. A query image is inverted into a query vector, and image similarity is determined by calculating a distance between the query vector and a catalog vector. In some examples, inversion is performed by training an encoder with the trained generator and inverting the catalog images with the encoder. In some examples, the trained generator is used to perform a search in a vector space. A weighting vector may be used to weight elements of the vectors, effectively prioritizing image features for image similarity determination.