Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) (, 2014) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images. However, they are notoriously hard to train and can suffer from the problem of missing modes where the model is not able to produce examples in certain regions of the space. We propose an iterative procedure, called AdaGAN, where at every step we add a new component into a mixture model by running a GAN algorithm on a reweighted sample. This is inspired by boosting algorithms, where many potentially weak individual predictors are greedily aggregated to form a strong composite predictor. We prove that such an incremental procedure leads to convergence to the true distribution in a finite number of steps if each step is optimal, and convergence at an exponential rate otherwise. We also illustrate experimentally that this procedure addresses the problem of missing modes.
Ensembles are a popular way to improve results of discriminative CNNs. The combination of several networks trained starting from different initializations improves results significantly. In this paper we investigate the usage of ensembles of GANs. The specific nature of GANs opens up several new ways to construct ensembles. The first one is based on the fact that in the minimax game which is played to optimize the GAN objective the generator network keeps on changing even after the network can be considered optimal. As such ensembles of GANs can be constructed based on the same network initialization but just taking models which have different amount of iterations. These so-called self ensembles are much faster to train than traditional ensembles. The second method, called cascade GANs, redirects part of the training data which is badly modeled by the first GAN to another GAN. In experiments on the CIFAR10 dataset we show that ensembles of GANs obtain model probability distributions which better model the data distribution. In addition, we show that these improved results can be obtained at little additional computational cost.