Precise Recovery of Latent Vectors from Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) transform latent vectors into visually plausible images. It is generally thought that the original GAN formulation gives no out-of-the-box method to reverse the mapping, projecting images back into latent space. We introduce a simple, gradient-based technique called stochastic clipping. In experiments, for images generated by the GAN, we precisely recover their latent vector pre-images 100% of the time. Additional experiments demonstrate that this method is robust to noise. Finally, we show that even for unseen images, our method appears to recover unique encodings.