Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most popular techniques in deep learning. GANs use two neural networks to generate new, synthetic instances of data that can pass for real data. This graph maps the most important papers and their video summaries derived from the original GANs proposed by Ian Goodfellow.

Must-Read Papers on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

StyleGAN | A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose an alternative generator architecture for generative adversarial
networks, borrowing from style transfer literature. The new architecture leads
to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes
(e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation
in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive,
scale-specific control of the synthesis. The new generator improves the
state-of-the-art in terms of traditional distribution quality metrics, leads to
demonstrably better interpolation properties, and also better disentangles the
latent factors of variation. To quantify interpolation quality and
disentanglement, we propose two new, automated methods that are applicable to
any generator architecture. Finally, we introduce a new, highly varied and
high-quality dataset of human faces.

Authors:
Tero Karras (NVIDIA)
Samuli Laine (NVIDIA)
Timo Aila (NVIDIA)

Generative Adversarial Networks

E-GAN | Evolutionary Generative Adversarial Networks | Paper Explained

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been effective for learning generative models for real-world data. However, existing GANs (GAN and its variants) tend to suffer from training problems such as instability and mode collapse. In this paper, we propose a novel GAN framework called evolutionary generative adversarial networks (E-GAN) for stable GAN training and improved generative performance. Unlike existing GANs, which employ a pre-defined adversarial objective function alternately training a generator and a discriminator, we utilize different adversarial training objectives as mutation operations and evolve a population of generators to adapt to the environment (i.e., the discriminator). We also utilize an evaluation mechanism to measure the quality and diversity of generated samples, such that only well-performing generator(s) are preserved and used for further training. In this way, E-GAN overcomes the limitations of an individual adversarial training objective and always preserves the best offspring, contributing to progress in and the success of GANs. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that E-GAN achieves convincing generative performance and reduces the training problems inherent in existing GANs.

Deep Learning

BEGAN: Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose a new equilibrium enforcing method paired with a loss derived from the Wasserstein distance for training auto-encoder based Generative Adversarial Networks. This method balances the generator and discriminator during training. Additionally, it provides a new approximate convergence measure, fast and stable training and high visual quality. We also derive a way of controlling the trade-off between image diversity and visual quality. We focus on the image generation task, setting a new milestone in visual quality, even at higher resolutions. This is achieved while using a relatively simple model architecture and a standard training procedure.

Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks

One of the challenges in the study of generative adversarial networks is the instability of its training. In this paper, we propose a novel weight normalization technique called spectral normalization to stabilize the training of the discriminator. Our new normalization technique is computationally light and easy to incorporate into existing implementations. We tested the efficacy of spectral normalization on CIFAR10, STL-10, and ILSVRC2012 dataset, and we experimentally confirmed that spectrally normalized GANs (SN-GANs) is capable of generating images of better or equal quality relative to the previous training stabilization techniques.

StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks | Demo

Abstract: Synthesizing high-quality images from text descriptions is a challenging problem in computer vision and has many practical applications. Samples generated by existing text-to-image approaches can roughly reflect the meaning of the given descriptions, but they fail to contain necessary details and vivid object parts. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) to generate 256x256 photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. We decompose the hard problem into more manageable sub-problems through a sketch-refinement process. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on the given text description, yielding Stage-I low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. It is able to rectify defects in Stage-I results and add compelling details with the refinement process. To improve the diversity of the synthesized images and stabilize the training of the conditional-GAN, we introduce a novel Conditioning Augmentation technique that encourages smoothness in the latent conditioning manifold. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements on generating photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions.

Authors: Han Zhang, Tao Xu, Hongsheng Li, Shaoting Zhang, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaolei Huang, Dimitris Metaxas (Rutgers University, Lehigh University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Baidu Research)

Image Synthesis

Computer Vision

Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are a powerful subclass of generative models. Despite a very rich research activity leading to numerous interesting GAN algorithms, it is still very hard to assess which algorithm(s) perform better than others. We conduct a neutral, multi-faceted large-scale empirical study on state-of-the art models and evaluation measures. We find that most models can reach similar scores with enough hyperparameter optimization and random restarts. This suggests that improvements can arise from a higher computational budget and tuning more than fundamental algorithmic changes. To overcome some limitations of the current metrics, we also propose several data sets on which precision and recall can be computed. Our experimental results suggest that future GAN research should be based on more systematic and objective evaluation procedures. Finally, we did not find evidence that any of the tested algorithms consistently outperforms the non-saturating GAN introduced in \cite{goodfellow2014generative}.

Self-Attention GAN | Attention Generative Adversarial Networks | Paper Explained

In this paper, we propose the Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SAGAN) which allows attention-driven, long-range dependency modeling for image generation tasks. Traditional convolutional GANs generate high-resolution details as a function of only spatially local points in lower-resolution feature maps. In SAGAN, details can be generated using cues from all feature locations. Moreover, the discriminator can check that highly detailed features in distant portions of the image are consistent with each other. Furthermore, recent work has shown that generator conditioning affects GAN performance. Leveraging this insight, we apply spectral normalization to the GAN generator and find that this improves training dynamics. The proposed SAGAN achieves the state-of-the-art results, boosting the best published Inception score from 36.8 to 52.52 and reducing Frechet Inception distance from 27.62 to 18.65 on the challenging ImageNet dataset. Visualization of the attention layers shows that the generator leverages neighborhoods that correspond to object shapes rather than local regions of fixed shape.

Spectral Normalization

SAGAN

Image Generation

Generative Adversarial Networks | Ian Goodfellow @ NIPS 2016 Tutorial

We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1/2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.

Convolution

Neural Network

Machine Learning

Data Science

DCGAN | Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks | Paper Explained

In recent years, supervised learning with convolutional networks (CNNs) has seen huge adoption in computer vision applications. Comparatively, unsupervised learning with CNNs has received less attention. In this work we hope to help bridge the gap between the success of CNNs for supervised learning and unsupervised learning. We introduce a class of CNNs called deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs), that have certain architectural constraints, and demonstrate that they are a strong candidate for unsupervised learning. Training on various image datasets, we show convincing evidence that our deep convolutional adversarial pair learns a hierarchy of representations from object parts to scenes in both the generator and discriminator. Additionally, we use the learned features for novel tasks - demonstrating their applicability as general image representations.

DCGAN

Unsupervised Learning

Improved Techniques for Training GANs | Paper explained

We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. We focus on two applications of GANs: semi-supervised learning, and the generation of images that humans find visually realistic. Unlike most work on generative models, our primary goal is not to train a model that assigns high likelihood to test data, nor do we require the model to be able to learn well without using any labels. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21.3%. We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes.

Authors: Tim Salimans, Ian Goodfellow, Wojciech Zaremba, Vicki Cheung, Alec Radford, Xi Chen

Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets

Generative Adversarial Nets [8] were recently introduced as a novel way to train generative models. In this work we introduce the conditional version of generative adversarial nets, which can be constructed by simply feeding the data, y, we wish to condition on to both the generator and discriminator. We show that this model can generate MNIST digits conditioned on class labels. We also illustrate how this model could be used to learn a multi-modal model, and provide preliminary examples of an application to image tagging in which we demonstrate how this approach can generate descriptive tags which are not part of training labels.

Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Automatic generation of facial images has been well studied after the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) came out. There exists some attempts applying the GAN model to the problem of generating facial images of anime characters, but none of the existing work gives a promising result. In this work, we explore the training of GAN models specialized on an anime facial image dataset. We address the issue from both the data and the model aspect, by collecting a more clean, well-suited dataset and leverage proper, empirical application of DRAGAN. With quantitative analysis and case studies we demonstrate that our efforts lead to a stable and high-quality model. Moreover, to assist people with anime character design, we build a website (http://make.girls.moe) with our pre-trained model available online, which makes the model easily accessible to general public.

Pix2Pix | Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks | Paper explained

We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Indeed, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, a large number of internet users (many of them artists) have posted their own experiments with our system, further demonstrating its wide applicability and ease of adoption without the need for parameter tweaking. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without hand-engineering our loss functions either.

Pix2Pix

Loss Functions

Image-To-Image Translation

ProGAN | Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation

We describe a new training methodology for generative adversarial networks.
The key idea is to grow both the generator and discriminator progressively:
starting from a low resolution, we add new layers that model increasingly fine
details as training progresses. This both speeds the training up and greatly
stabilizes it, allowing us to produce images of unprecedented quality, e.g.,
CelebA images at 1024^2. We also propose a simple way to increase the variation
in generated images, and achieve a record inception score of 8.80 in
unsupervised CIFAR10. Additionally, we describe several implementation details
that are important for discouraging unhealthy competition between the generator
and discriminator. Finally, we suggest a new metric for evaluating GAN results,
both in terms of image quality and variation. As an additional contribution, we
construct a higher-quality version of the CelebA dataset.

Wasserstein GAN | Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN) Introduction

We introduce a new algorithm named WGAN, an alternative to traditional GAN training. In this new model, we show that we can improve the stability of learning, get rid of problems like mode collapse, and provide meaningful learning curves useful for debugging and hyperparameter searches. Furthermore, we show that the corresponding optimization problem is sound, and provide extensive theoretical work highlighting the deep connections to other distances between distributions.

WGAN

Convolutional Neural Networks

Recurrent Neural Networks

Optimization

CycleGAN | Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks

Image-to-image translation is a class of vision and graphics problems where the goal is to learn the mapping between an input image and an output image using a training set of aligned image pairs. However, for many tasks, paired training data will not be available. We present an approach for learning to translate an image from a source domain $X$ to a target domain $Y$ in the absence of paired examples. Our goal is to learn a mapping $G: X \rightarrow Y$ such that the distribution of images from $G(X)$ is indistinguishable from the distribution $Y$ using an adversarial loss. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we couple it with an inverse mapping $F: Y \rightarrow X$ and introduce a cycle consistency loss to push $F(G(X)) \approx X$ (and vice versa). Qualitative results are presented on several tasks where paired training data does not exist, including collection style transfer, object transfiguration, season transfer, photo enhancement, etc. Quantitative comparisons against several prior methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

Other recommended papers

Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study

Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks

Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with Generative Adversarial Networks

BEGAN: Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Networks

Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets

Crossminds Chrome Extension

Other recommended papers

Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study

Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks

Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with Generative Adversarial Networks

BEGAN: Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Networks

Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets

Crossminds Chrome Extension

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