We build on recent advances in progressively growing generative autoencoder models. These models can encode and reconstruct existing images, and generate novel ones, at resolutions comparable to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), while consisting only of a single encoder and decoder network. The ability to reconstruct and arbitrarily modify existing samples such as images separates autoencoder models from GANs, but the output quality of image autoencoders has remained inferior. The recently proposed PIONEER autoencoder can reconstruct faces in the @math CelebAHQ dataset, but like IntroVAE, another recent method, it often loses the identity of the person in the process. We propose an improved and simplified version of PIONEER and show significantly improved quality and preservation of the face identity in CelebAHQ, both visually and quantitatively. We also show evidence of state-of-the-art disentanglement of the latent space of the model, both quantitatively and via realistic image feature manipulations. On the LSUN Bedrooms dataset, our model also improves the results of the original PIONEER. Overall, our results indicate that the PIONEER networks provide a way to photorealistic face manipulation.
During the recent years there has been rapid progress related to GAN-based models and applications. Many recent improvements improve the stability and robustness of the training process by suggesting new loss functions @cite_37 , regularization methods @cite_14 @cite_30 @cite_4 , multi-resolution training @cite_33 @cite_12 , architectures @cite_18 , or combinations of these.
@cite_30 @cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_18 @cite_12
2724651715 2798844427 2580360036 2607491080
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are highly effective unsupervised learning frameworks that can generate very sharp data, even for data such as images with complex, highly multimodal distributions. However GANs are known to be very hard to train, suffering from problems such as mode collapse and disturbing visual artifacts. Batch normalization (BN) techniques have been introduced to address the training. Though BN accelerates the training in the beginning, our experiments show that the use of BN can be unstable and negatively impact the quality of the trained model. The evaluation of BN and numerous other recent schemes for improving GAN training is hindered by the lack of an effective objective quality measure for GAN models. To address these issues, we first introduce a weight normalization (WN) approach for GAN training that significantly improves the stability, efficiency and the quality of the generated samples. To allow a methodical evaluation, we introduce squared Euclidean reconstruction error on a test set as a new objective measure, to assess training performance in terms of speed, stability, and quality of generated samples. Our experiments with a standard DCGAN architecture on commonly used datasets (CelebA, LSUN bedroom, and CIFAR-10) indicate that training using WN is generally superior to BN for GANs, achieving 10 lower mean squared loss for reconstruction and significantly better qualitative results than BN. We further demonstrate the stability of WN on a 21-layer ResNet trained with the CelebA data set. The code for this paper is available at this https URL This paper proposes an unpaired learning method for image enhancement. Given a set of photographs with the desired characteristics, the proposed method learns a photo enhancer which transforms an input image into an enhanced image with those characteristics. The method is based on the framework of two-way generative adversarial networks (GANs) with several improvements. First, we augment the U-Net with global features and show that it is more effective. The global U-Net acts as the generator in our GAN model. Second, we improve Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) with an adaptive weighting scheme. With this scheme, training converges faster and better, and is less sensitive to parameters than WGAN-GP. Finally, we propose to use individual batch normalization layers for generators in two-way GANs. It helps generators better adapt to their own input distributions. All together, they significantly improve the stability of GAN training for our application. Both quantitative and visual results show that the proposed method is effective for enhancing images. In this paper, we present the Lipschitz regularization theory and algorithms for a novel Loss-Sensitive Generative Adversarial Network (LS-GAN). Specifically, it trains a loss function to distinguish between real and fake samples by designated margins, while learning a generator alternately to produce realistic samples by minimizing their losses. The LS-GAN further regularizes its loss function with a Lipschitz regularity condition on the density of real data, yielding a regularized model that can better generalize to produce new data from a reasonable number of training examples than the classic GAN. We will further present a Generalized LS-GAN (GLS-GAN) and show it contains a large family of regularized GAN models, including both LS-GAN and Wasserstein GAN, as its special cases. Compared with the other GAN models, we will conduct experiments to show both LS-GAN and GLS-GAN exhibit competitive ability in generating new images in terms of the Minimum Reconstruction Error (MRE) assessed on a separate test set. We further extend the LS-GAN to a conditional form for supervised and semi-supervised learning problems, and demonstrate its outstanding performance on image classification tasks. Traditional generative adversarial networks (GAN) and many of its variants are trained by minimizing the KL or JS-divergence loss that measures how close the generated data distribution is from the true data distribution. A recent advance called the WGAN based on Wasserstein distance can improve on the KL and JS-divergence based GANs, and alleviate the gradient vanishing, instability, and mode collapse issues that are common in the GAN training. In this work, we aim at improving on the WGAN by first generalizing its discriminator loss to a margin-based one, which leads to a better discriminator, and in turn a better generator, and then carrying out a progressive training paradigm involving multiple GANs to contribute to the maximum margin ranking loss so that the GAN at later stages will improve upon early stages. We call this method Gang of GANs (GoGAN). We have shown theoretically that the proposed GoGAN can reduce the gap between the true data distribution and the generated data distribution by at least half in an optimally trained WGAN. We have also proposed a new way of measuring GAN quality which is based on image completion tasks. We have evaluated our method on four visual datasets: CelebA, LSUN Bedroom, CIFAR-10, and 50K-SSFF, and have seen both visual and quantitative improvement over baseline WGAN.