How to reduce the "Grid shape" in image which generated from your model?

[semchan]

[siyuhuang]

The grid artifact is caused by the squeeze operation, which splits features and concatenates them along the channel dimension. The squeeze operation is a replacement of the spatial pooling layer for lossless feature extraction and reconstruction to avoid the content leak. You may reduce the grid artifact by using less squeeze operations, at the expense of a slightly worse stylization performance.

[pirxus]

Could you please elaborate as to why this happens? It seems that for reverse style transfer purposes - as referred to in the supplementary material to your paper - the grid artifacts aren't present. They form, however, every time the original style factor of an image is replaced.