The procedural generation of video game levels has existed for at least 30 years, but only recently have machine learning approaches been used to generate levels without specifying the rules for generation. A number of these have looked at platformer levels as a sequence of characters and performed generation using Markov chains. In this paper we examine the use of Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural networks (LSTMs) for the purpose of generating levels trained from a corpus of Super Mario Brothers levels. We analyze a number of different data representations and how the generated levels fit into the space of human authored Super Mario Brothers levels.
Procedural generation via neural networks has most been focused on image and text generation. Both have typically been byproducts of trying to train a network for some sort of classification process. Google's Inceptionism ( @cite_5 ) took the product of training an image classifier and manipulated images to better match the set classification class, such as dogs. Facebook's Eyescream had image generation as the goal ( @cite_7 ) and used adversarial networks, one network trying to generate images and the other trying to determine if what it was seeing was generated or real.
@cite_5 @cite_7
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Generating high-resolution, photo-realistic images has been a long-standing goal in machine learning. Recently, (2016) showed one interesting way to synthesize novel images by performing gradient ascent in the latent space of a generator network to maximize the activations of one or multiple neurons in a separate classifier network. In this paper we extend this method by introducing an additional prior on the latent code, improving both sample quality and sample diversity, leading to a state-of-the-art generative model that produces high quality images at higher resolutions (227x227) than previous generative models, and does so for all 1000 ImageNet categories. In addition, we provide a unified probabilistic interpretation of related activation maximization methods and call the general class of models "Plug and Play Generative Networks". PPGNs are composed of 1) a generator network G that is capable of drawing a wide range of image types and 2) a replaceable "condition" network C that tells the generator what to draw. We demonstrate the generation of images conditioned on a class (when C is an ImageNet or MIT Places classification network) and also conditioned on a caption (when C is an image captioning network). Our method also improves the state of the art of Multifaceted Feature Visualization, which generates the set of synthetic inputs that activate a neuron in order to better understand how deep neural networks operate. Finally, we show that our model performs reasonably well at the task of image inpainting. While image models are used in this paper, the approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied to many types of data. Generating high-resolution, photo-realistic images has been a long-standing goal in machine learning. Recently, [37] showed one interesting way to synthesize novel images by performing gradient ascent in the latent space of a generator network to maximize the activations of one or multiple neurons in a separate classifier network. In this paper we extend this method by introducing an additional prior on the latent code, improving both sample quality and sample diversity, leading to a state-of-the-art generative model that produces high quality images at higher resolutions (227 &#xd7; 227) than previous generative models, and does so for all 1000 ImageNet categories. In addition, we provide a unified probabilistic interpretation of related activation maximization methods and call the general class of models Plug and Play Generative Networks. PPGNs are composed of 1) a generator network G that is capable of drawing a wide range of image types and 2) a replaceable condition network C that tells the generator what to draw. We demonstrate the generation of images conditioned on a class (when C is an ImageNet or MIT Places classification network) and also conditioned on a caption (when C is an image captioning network). Our method also improves the state of the art of Multifaceted Feature Visualization [40], which generates the set of synthetic inputs that activate a neuron in order to better understand how deep neural networks operate. Finally, we show that our model performs reasonably well at the task of image inpainting. While image models are used in this paper, the approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied to many types of data. Recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs), using deep convolutional models, have supported the development of image generation techniques able to reach satisfactory levels of realism. Further improvements have been proposed to condition GANs to generate images matching a specific object category or a short text description. In this work, we build on the latter class of approaches and investigate the possibility of driving and conditioning the image generation process by means of brain signals recorded, through an electroencephalograph (EEG), while users look at images from a set of 40 ImageNet object categories with the objective of generating the seen images. To accomplish this task, we first demonstrate that brain activity EEG signals encode visually-related information that allows us to accurately discriminate between visual object categories and, accordingly, we extract a more compact class-dependent representation of EEG data using recurrent neural networks. Afterwards, we use the learned EEG manifold to condition image generation employing GANs, which, during inference, will read EEG signals and convert them into images. We tested our generative approach using EEG signals recorded from six subjects while looking at images of the aforementioned 40 visual classes. The results show that for classes represented by well-defined visual patterns (e.g., pandas, airplane, etc.), the generated images are realistic and highly resemble those evoking the EEG signals used for conditioning GANs, resulting in an actual reading-the-mind process. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown great promise recently in image generation. Training GANs for language generation has proven to be more difficult, because of the non-differentiable nature of generating text with recurrent neural networks. Consequently, past work has either resorted to pre-training with maximum-likelihood or used convolutional networks for generation. In this work, we show that recurrent neural networks can be trained to generate text with GANs from scratch using curriculum learning, by slowly teaching the model to generate sequences of increasing and variable length. We empirically show that our approach vastly improves the quality of generated sequences compared to a convolutional baseline.