  Face attributes are interesting due to their detailed description of human
faces. Unlike prior researches working on attribute prediction, we address an
inverse and more challenging problem called face attribute manipulation which
aims at modifying a face image according to a given attribute value. Instead of
manipulating the whole image, we propose to learn the corresponding residual
image defined as the difference between images before and after the
manipulation. In this way, the manipulation can be operated efficiently with
modest pixel modification. The framework of our approach is based on the
Generative Adversarial Network. It consists of two image transformation
networks and a discriminative network. The transformation networks are
responsible for the attribute manipulation and its dual operation and the
discriminative network is used to distinguish the generated images from real
images. We also apply dual learning to allow transformation networks to learn
from each other. Experiments show that residual images can be effectively
learned and used for attribute manipulations. The generated images remain most
of the details in attribute-irrelevant areas.
