The GAN Landscape: Losses, Architectures, Regularization, and Normalization

Karol Kurach*, Mario Lucic*, Xiaohua Zhai, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly

Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a class of deep generative models which aim to learn a target distribution in an unsupervised fashion. While they were successfully applied to many problems, training a GAN is a notoriously challenging task and requires a significant amount of hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture engineering, and a non-trivial amount of "tricks". The success in many practical applications coupled with the lack of a measure to quantify the failure modes of GANs resulted in a plethora of proposed losses, regularization and normalization schemes, and neural architectures. In this work we take a sober view of the current state of GANs from a practical perspective. We reproduce the current state of the art and go beyond fairly exploring the GAN landscape. We discuss common pitfalls and reproducibility issues, open-source our code on Github, and provide pre-trained models on TensorFlow Hub.

Keywords: GANs, quantitative evaluation, normalization and regularization

TL;DR: Thorough empirical study of the GAN landscape