Sobolev GAN

Youssef Mroueh, Chun-Liang Li, Tom Sercu, Anant Raj, Yu Cheng

Abstract: We propose a new Integral Probability Metric (IPM) between distributions: the Sobolev IPM. The Sobolev IPM compares the mean discrepancy of two distributions for functions (critic) restricted to a Sobolev ball defined with respect to a dominant measure mu. We show that the Sobolev IPM compares two distributions in high dimensions based on weighted conditional Cumulative Distribution Functions (CDF) of each coordinate on a leave one out basis. The Dominant measure mu plays a crucial role as it defines the support on which conditional CDFs are compared. Sobolev IPM can be seen as an extension of the one dimensional Von-Mises Cramer statistics to high dimensional distributions. We show how Sobolev IPM can be used to train Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We then exploit the intrinsic conditioning implied by Sobolev IPM in text generation. Finally we show that a variant of Sobolev GAN achieves competitive results in semi-supervised learning on CIFAR-10, thanks to the smoothness enforced on the critic by Sobolev GAN which relates to Laplacian regularization.

TL;DR: We define a new Integral Probability Metric (Sobolev IPM) and show how it can be used for training GANs for text generation and semi-supervised learning.

Keywords: GAN theory, Integral Probability Metrics, elliptic PDE and diffusion, GAN for discrete sequences, semi-supervised learning.

Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10)

Code: [ 2 community implementations](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=SJA7xfb0b)