Yeah no I get this but the naming convention has become so prolific that anyone working in generative space hears "Style<thing>" and you should think "GAN". (I work in generative vision btw)
My point is not that it is technically right, it is that the name is strongly related with the concept now. Such that if you use a style based network and don't name it StyleX that it's odd and might look like you're trying to claim you've done more. Not that there aren't plenty of GANs that are using Karras's code and called something else.
> AdaIN
Yes, StyleGAN (version 1) uses AdaIN but StyleGAN2 (and beyond) doesn't. AdaIN stands for Adaptive Instance Normalization. While they use it in that network, to be clear, they did not invent AdaIN and the technique isn't explicit to style, it's a normalization technique. One that StyleGAN2 modifies because the standard one creates strong and localized spikes in the statistics which results in image artifacts.
So what I'm hearing is... no one should use "style" in its name anymore to describe style transfers because it's too closely associated with a set of models in a sub-field that uses a different concept to apply style that used "style" in its name, unless it also uses that unrelated concept in its implementation? Is that the gist of it, because that sounds a bit mental.
(I'm half kidding, I get what you mean, but also, think about it. The alternative is worse.)
I mean yeah, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be able to use the name. There's no control of "StyleX" but it certainly is a poor choice that can lead to confusion. That's all I'm getting at. 100% this is an opinion (would be insane if believed to be anything else).
I don't think it is just a "sub-field" as you mention and it definitely isn't like StyleGAN isn't known by nearly every person that learns ML (I have seen very few courses that do not mention it, but those tend to be ones that don't discuss generation at all). StyleGAN is one of the most well known models that exist. Up there with GPT, YOLO, and ViT. Realistically we use these names as a style of model now rather than the actual original model themselves (or somewhat interchangeably).
The original StyleTTS's abstract has the line
> Here, we propose StyleTTS, a
style-based generative model for parallel TTS
And I certainly would not blame anyone for thinking "Oh, they're using a StyleGAN". That's all I'm saying. Their style encoder looks nothing like the StyleGAN's style encoder. It looks a bit closer to the synthesis network but that's just because they're using Leaky ReLUs and AdaIN, but like we said before, that's not really a StyleGAN specific thing. There are also other parts we could say look similar but they are pretty generic sections that I wouldn't particularly think uniquely pertains to StyleGAN architectures (or StyleDiffusion ones that do make this callback).
It other words, it's like naming something iX. Sure, Apple doesn't have complete control over a leading letter but I also understand Apple's claim that such a naming pattern can confuse people. Certainly a name collision. Hell, I'll say that the authors that made this paper knew what they were doing https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01452
I just think they can come up with a better name that has worse chance of collision. It's not like StyleTTS is a particularly creative name or even that apt of a description either. Names are important because they do mean things. You may think it is not a poor choice of naming and that's okay too. But we also work in different fields too and I'd argue that research papers are aimed at other researchers, where I would be surprised if anyone works in generations (image, voice, language, data, whatever) is not well aware of the Style based networks. Because I can use that sentence and it make sense to most ML people.
My point is not that it is technically right, it is that the name is strongly related with the concept now. Such that if you use a style based network and don't name it StyleX that it's odd and might look like you're trying to claim you've done more. Not that there aren't plenty of GANs that are using Karras's code and called something else.
> AdaIN
Yes, StyleGAN (version 1) uses AdaIN but StyleGAN2 (and beyond) doesn't. AdaIN stands for Adaptive Instance Normalization. While they use it in that network, to be clear, they did not invent AdaIN and the technique isn't explicit to style, it's a normalization technique. One that StyleGAN2 modifies because the standard one creates strong and localized spikes in the statistics which results in image artifacts.