Tempered Adversarial Networks

Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Giambattista Parascandolo, Arash Mehrjou, Bernhard Schölkopf

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been shown to produce realistic samples from high-dimensional distributions, but training them is considered hard. A possible explanation for training instabilities is the inherent imbalance between the networks: While the discriminator is trained directly on both real and fake samples, the generator only has control over the fake samples it produces since the real data distribution is fixed by the choice of a given dataset. We propose a simple modification that gives the generator control over the real samples, leading to a tempered learning process for both generator and discriminator. The real data distribution passes through a lens before being revealed to the discriminator, balancing the training process by gradually revealing more detailed features necessary to produce high-quality results. The proposed module automatically adjusts the learning process to the current strength of the networks, yet is generic and easy to add to any GAN variant. In a number of experiments, we show that this is a promising technique to improve quality, stability and/or convergence speed across a range of different GAN architectures (DCGAN, LSGAN, WGAN-GP).

TL;DR: Passing the real data distribution in a GAN through a lens stabilizes training and leads to better results in DCGAN, LSGAN and WGAN-GP.

Keywords: generative adversarial networks