A latent code defined in an input space is processed by the mapping neural network to produce an intermediate latent code defined in an intermediate latent space. The intermediate latent code may be used as appearance vector that is processed by the synthesis neural network to generate an image. The appearance vector is a compressed encoding of data, such as video frames including a person's face, audio, and other data. Captured images may be converted into appearance vectors at a local device and transmitted to a remote device using much less bandwidth compared with transmitting the captured images. A synthesis neural network at the remote device reconstructs the images for display.