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.
Deep Convolutional GANs @cite_1 (DCGANs) first introduced a convolutional architecture which led to improved visual quality. More recently, Energy Based GANs @cite_16 (EBGANs) were proposed as a class of GANs that aims to model the discriminator @math as an energy function. This variant converges more stably and is both easy to train and robust to hyper-parameter variations. The authors attribute some of these benefits to the larger number of targets in the discriminator. EBGAN likewise implements its discriminator as an auto-encoder with a per-pixel error.
@cite_16 @cite_1
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We introduce the "Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network" model (EBGAN) which views the discriminator as an energy function that attributes low energies to the regions near the data manifold and higher energies to other regions. Similar to the probabilistic GANs, a generator is seen as being trained to produce contrastive samples with minimal energies, while the discriminator is trained to assign high energies to these generated samples. Viewing the discriminator as an energy function allows to use a wide variety of architectures and loss functionals in addition to the usual binary classifier with logistic output. Among them, we show one instantiation of EBGAN framework as using an auto-encoder architecture, with the energy being the reconstruction error, in place of the discriminator. We show that this form of EBGAN exhibits more stable behavior than regular GANs during training. We also show that a single-scale architecture can be trained to generate high-resolution images. We introduce the "Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network" model (EBGAN) which views the discriminator as an energy function that attributes low energies to the regions near the data manifold and higher energies to other regions. Similar to the probabilistic GANs, a generator is seen as being trained to produce contrastive samples with minimal energies, while the discriminator is trained to assign high energies to these generated samples. Viewing the discriminator as an energy function allows to use a wide variety of architectures and loss functionals in addition to the usual binary classifier with logistic output. Among them, we show one instantiation of EBGAN framework as using an auto-encoder architecture, with the energy being the reconstruction error, in place of the discriminator. We show that this form of EBGAN exhibits more stable behavior than regular GANs during training. We also show that a single-scale architecture can be trained to generate high-resolution images. 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. 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.