Training GANs with Stronger Augmentations via Contrastive Discriminator

Jongheon Jeong, Jinwoo Shin

Keywords: generative adversarial networks, contrastive learning, data augmentation, visual representation learning, unsupervised learning

Abstract: Recent works in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are actively revisiting various data augmentation techniques as an effective way to prevent discriminator overfitting. It is still unclear, however, that which augmentations could actually improve GANs, and in particular, how to apply a wider range of augmentations in training. In this paper, we propose a novel way to address these questions by incorporating a recent contrastive representation learning scheme into the GAN discriminator, coined ContraD. This "fusion" enables the discriminators to work with much stronger augmentations without increasing their training instability, thereby preventing the discriminator overfitting issue in GANs more effectively. Even better, we observe that the contrastive learning itself also benefits from our GAN training, i.e., by maintaining discriminative features between real and fake samples, suggesting a strong coherence between the two worlds: good contrastive representations are also good for GAN discriminators, and vice versa. Our experimental results show that GANs with ContraD consistently improve FID and IS compared to other recent techniques incorporating data augmentations, still maintaining highly discriminative features in the discriminator in terms of the linear evaluation. Finally, as a byproduct, we also show that our GANs trained in an unsupervised manner (without labels) can induce many conditional generative models via a simple latent sampling, leveraging the learned features of ContraD. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-jeong/ContraD.

One-sentence Summary: We propose a novel discriminator of GAN showing that contrastive representation learning, e.g., SimCLR, and GAN can benefit each other when they are jointly trained.

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Code: [ jh-jeong/ContraD](https://github.com/jh-jeong/ContraD)

Data: [AFHQ](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/afhq), [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10), [CIFAR-100](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-100)

Community Implementations: [ 5 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2103.09742/code)