iWGAN: an Autoencoder WGAN for Inference

Yao Chen, Qingyi Gao, Xiao Wang

Keywords: Generative model, Autoencoder, Inference

Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been impactful on many problems and applications but suffer from unstable training. Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) leverages the Wasserstein distance to avoid the caveats in the minmax two-player training of GANs but has other defects such as mode collapse and lack of metric to detect the convergence. We introduce a novel inference WGAN (iWGAN) model, which is a principled framework to fuse auto-encoders and WGANs. The iWGAN jointly learns an encoder network and a generative network using an iterative primal dual optimization process. We establish the generalization error bound of iWGANs. We further provide a rigorous probabilistic interpretation of our model under the framework of maximum likelihood estimation. The iWGAN, with a clear stopping criteria, has many advantages over other autoencoder GANs. The empirical experiments show that our model greatly mitigates the symptom of mode collapse, speeds up the convergence, and is able to provide a measurement of quality check for each individual sample. We illustrate the ability of iWGANs by obtaining a competitive and stable performance with state-of-the-art for benchmark datasets.

Code: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-_vIrbOYwf2BH1lOrVEcEPJUxkyV5CiB?usp=sharing