  Image-to-image (I2I) translation is a pixel-level mapping that requires a
large number of paired training data and often suffers from the problems of
high diversity and strong category bias in image scenes. In order to tackle
these problems, we propose a novel BiLevel (BiL) learning paradigm that
alternates the learning of two models, respectively at an instance-specific
(IS) and a general-purpose (GP) level. In each scene, the IS model learns to
maintain the specific scene attributes. It is initialized by the GP model that
learns from all the scenes to obtain the generalizable translation knowledge.
This GP initialization gives the IS model an efficient starting point, thus
enabling its fast adaptation to the new scene with scarce training data. We
conduct extensive I2I translation experiments on human face and street view
datasets. Quantitative results validate that our approach can significantly
boost the performance of classical I2I translation models, such as PG2 and
Pix2Pix. Our visualization results show both higher image quality and more
appropriate instance-specific details, e.g., the translated image of a person
looks more like that person in terms of identity.
