  Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual
domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of
aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input
image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled
representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To
achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a
domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and
a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features
extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the
attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired
training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on
disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can
generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired
training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study
and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to
domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the
state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
