Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are one of the most popular methods for generating images today. While impressive results have been validated by visual inspection, a number of quantitative criteria have emerged only recently. We argue here that the existing ones are insufficient and need to be in adequation with the task at hand. In this paper we introduce two measures based on image classification---GAN-train and GAN-test, which approximate the recall (diversity) and precision (quality of the image) of GANs respectively. We evaluate a number of recent GAN approaches based on these two measures and demonstrate a clear difference in performance. Furthermore, we observe that the increasing difficulty of the dataset, from CIFAR10 over CIFAR100 to ImageNet, shows an inverse correlation with the quality of the GANs, as clearly evident from our measures.
Precision and recall measures were introduced @cite_35 in the context of GANs, by constructing a synthetic data manifold. This makes it possible to compute the distance of an image sample (generated or real) to the manifold, by finding its distance to the closest point from the manifold. In this synthetic setup, precision is defined as the fraction of the generated samples whose distance to the manifold is below a certain threshold. Recall, on the other hand, is computed by considering a set of test samples. First, the latent representation @math of each test sample @math is estimated, through gradient descent, by inverting the generator @math . Recall is then given by the fraction of test samples whose L2-distance to @math is below the threshold. High recall is equivalent to the GAN capturing most of the manifold, and high precision implies that the generated samples are close to the manifold. Although these measures bring the flavor of techniques used widely to evaluate discriminative models to GANs, they are impractical for real images as the data manifold is unknown, and their use is limited to evaluations on synthetic data @cite_35 .
@cite_35
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We propose in this paper a new approach to train the Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) with a mixture of generators to overcome the mode collapsing problem. The main intuition is to employ multiple generators, instead of using a single one as in the original GAN. The idea is simple, yet proven to be extremely effective at covering diverse data modes, easily overcoming the mode collapsing problem and delivering state-of-the-art results. A minimax formulation was able to establish among a classifier, a discriminator, and a set of generators in a similar spirit with GAN. Generators create samples that are intended to come from the same distribution as the training data, whilst the discriminator determines whether samples are true data or generated by generators, and the classifier specifies which generator a sample comes from. The distinguishing feature is that internal samples are created from multiple generators, and then one of them will be randomly selected as final output similar to the mechanism of a probabilistic mixture model. We term our method Mixture Generative Adversarial Nets (MGAN). We develop theoretical analysis to prove that, at the equilibrium, the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) between the mixture of generators’ distributions and the empirical data distribution is minimal, whilst the JSD among generators’ distributions is maximal, hence effectively avoiding the mode collapsing problem. By utilizing parameter sharing, our proposed model adds minimal computational cost to the standard GAN, and thus can also efficiently scale to large-scale datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic 2D data and natural image databases (CIFAR-10, STL-10 and ImageNet) to demonstrate the superior performance of our MGAN in achieving state-of-the-art Inception scores over latest baselines, generating diverse and appealing recognizable objects at different resolutions, and specializing in capturing different types of objects by the generators.