Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have received a tremendous amount of attention in the past few years, and have inspired applications addressing a wide range of problems. Despite its great potential, GANs are difficult to train. Recently, a series of papers (Arjovsky & Bottou, 2017a; Arjovsky et al. 2017b; and Gulrajani et al. 2017) proposed using Wasserstein distance as the training objective and promised easy, stable GAN training across architectures with minimal hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we compare the performance of Wasserstein distance with other training objectives on a variety of GAN architectures in the context of single image super-resolution. Our results agree that Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) provides stable and converging GAN training and that Wasserstein distance is an effective metric to gauge training progress.
Cambridge Image Analysis Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学应用数学与理论物理系剑桥图像分析组）；Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath（巴斯大学数学科学系）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
Wasserstein GANs are based on the idea of minimising the Wasserstein distance between a real and a generated distribution. We provide an in-depth mathematical analysis of differences between the theoretical setup and the reality of training Wasserstein GANs. In this work, we gather both theoretical and empirical evidence that the WGAN loss is not a meaningful approximation of the Wasserstein distance. Moreover, we argue that the Wasserstein distance is not even a desirable loss function for deep generative models, and conclude that the success of Wasserstein GANs can in truth be attributed to …
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；IT University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根信息技术大学）
Generative Adversial Networks (GANs) have made a major impact in computer vision and machine learning as generative models. Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) brought Optimal Transport (OT) theory into GANs, by minimizing the $1$-Wasserstein distance between model and data distributions as their objective function. Since then, WGANs have gained considerable interest due to their stability and theoretical framework. We contribute to the WGAN literature by introducing the family of $(q,p)$-Wasserstein GANs, which allow the use of more general $p$-Wasserstein metrics for $p\geq 1$ in the GAN learning proce…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have enjoyed much success in learning high-dimensional distributions. Learning objectives approximately minimize an $f$-divergence ($f$-GANs) or an integral probability metric (Wasserstein GANs) between the model and the data distribution using a discriminator. Wasserstein GANs enjoy superior empirical performance, but in $f$-GANs the discriminator can be interpreted as a density ratio estimator which is necessary in some GAN applications. In this paper, we bridge the gap between $f$-GANs and Wasserstein GANs (WGANs). First, we list two constraints over v…
This report has several purposes. First, our report is written to investigate the reproducibility of the submitted paper On the regularization of Wasserstein GANs (2018). Second, among the experiments performed in the submitted paper, five aspects were emphasized and reproduced: learning speed, stability, robustness against hyperparameter, estimating the Wasserstein distance, and various sampling method. Finally, we identify which parts of the contribution can be reproduced, and at what cost in terms of resources. All source code for reproduction is open to the public.
Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs) provide a versatile class of models, which have attracted great attention in various applications. However, this framework has two main drawbacks: (i) Wasserstein-1 (or Earth-Mover) distance is restrictive such that WGANs cannot always fit data geometry well; (ii) It is difficult to achieve fast training of WGANs. In this paper, we propose a new class of \textit{Relaxed Wasserstein} (RW) distances by generalizing Wasserstein-1 distance with Bregman cost functions. We show that RW distances achieve nice statistical properties while not sacrifi…
Wasserstein-GANs have been introduced to address the deficiencies of generative adversarial networks (GANs) regarding the problems of vanishing gradients and mode collapse during the training, leading to improved convergence behaviour and improved image quality. However, Wasserstein-GANs require the discriminator to be Lipschitz continuous. In current state-of-the-art Wasserstein-GANs this constraint is enforced via gradient norm regularization. In this paper, we demonstrate that this regularization does not encourage a broad distribution of spectral-values in the discriminator weights, hence …
University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（Mila - 魁北克人工智能研究所）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；HEC Montreal（蒙特利尔高等商学院）；CIFAR AI Research Chair（CIFAR人工智能研究讲席）
Wasserstein GANs (WGANs), built upon the Kantorovich-Rubinstein (KR) duality of Wasserstein distance, is one of the most theoretically sound GAN models. However, in practice it does not always outperform other variants of GANs. This is mostly due to the imperfect implementation of the Lipschitz condition required by the KR duality. Extensive work has been done in the community with different implementations of the Lipschitz constraint, which, however, is still hard to satisfy the restriction perfectly in practice. In this paper, we argue that the strong Lipschitz constraint might be unnecessar…
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）；Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences（库朗数学科学研究所）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Criteo AI Lab（科睿唯安人工智能实验室）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been successful in producing outstanding results in areas as diverse as image, video, and text generation. Building on these successes, a large number of empirical studies have validated the benefits of the cousin approach called Wasserstein GANs (WGANs), which brings stabilization in the training process. In the present paper, we add a new stone to the edifice by proposing some theoretical advances in the properties of WGANs. First, we properly define the architecture of WGANs in the context of integral probability metrics parameterized by neural ne…
Generative-adversarial networks (GANs) have been used to produce data closely resembling example data in a compressed, latent space that is close to sufficient for reconstruction in the original vector space. The Wasserstein metric has been used as an alternative to binary cross-entropy, producing more numerically stable GANs with greater mode covering behavior. Here, a generalization of the Wasserstein distance, using higher-order moments than the mean, is derived. Training a GAN with this higher-order Wasserstein metric is demonstrated to exhibit superior performance, even when adjusted for …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
We investigate the training and performance of generative adversarial networks using the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) as critic, termed MMD GANs. As our main theoretical contribution, we clarify the situation with bias in GAN loss functions raised by recent work: we show that gradient estimators used in the optimization process for both MMD GANs and Wasserstein GANs are unbiased, but learning a discriminator based on samples leads to biased gradients for the generator parameters. We also discuss the issue of kernel choice for the MMD critic, and characterize the kernel corresponding to the e…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are an exciting alternative to algorithms for solving density estimation problems---using data to assess how likely samples are to be drawn from the same distribution. Instead of explicitly computing these probabilities, GANs learn a generator that can match the given probabilistic source. This paper looks particularly at this matching capability in the context of problems with one-dimensional outputs. We identify a class of function decompositions with properties that make them well suited to the critic role in a leading approach to GANs known as Wassers…
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）；Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been used to model the underlying probability distribution of sample based datasets. GANs are notoriuos for training difficulties and their dependence on arbitrary hyperparameters. One recent improvement in GAN literature is to use the Wasserstein distance as loss function leading to Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs). Using this as a basis, we show various ways in which the Wasserstein distance is estimated for the task of generative modelling. Additionally, the secrets in training such models are shown and summarized at the end of …
In cases where a Wasserstein GAN depends on a condition the latter is usually handled via an expectation within the loss function. Depending on the way this is motivated, the discriminator is either required to be Lipschitz-1 in both or in only one of its arguments. For the weaker requirement to become usable one needs to exchange a supremum and an expectation. This is a mathematically perilous operation, which is, so far, only partially justified in the literature. This short mathematical note intends to fill this gap and provides the mathematical rationale for discriminators that are only pa…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）
Generative Adversarial Networks are a popular method for learning distributions from data by modeling the target distribution as a function of a known distribution. The function, often referred to as the generator, is optimized to minimize a chosen distance measure between the generated and target distributions. One commonly used measure for this purpose is the Wasserstein distance. However, Wasserstein distance is hard to compute and optimize, and in practice entropic regularization techniques are used to improve numerical convergence. The influence of regularization on the learned solution, …
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61
Robustness to adversarial attacks is an important concern due to the fragility of deep neural networks to small perturbations and has received an abundance of attention in recent years. Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a particularly promising way of addressing this challenge, studies robustness via divergence-based uncertainty sets and has provided valuable insights into robustification strategies such as regularization. In the context of machine learning, the majority of existing results have chosen $f$-divergences, Wasserstein distances and more recently, the Maximum Mean Discrep…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been impactful on many problems and applications but suffer from unstable training. The 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 inferential Wasserstein GAN (iWGAN) model, which is a principled framework to fuse auto-encoders and WGANs. The iWGAN model jointly learns an encoder network and a generator network motivated by the iterative primal dual optimization pr…
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Despite being impactful on a variety of problems and applications, the generative adversarial nets (GANs) are remarkably difficult to train. This issue is formally analyzed by \cite{arjovsky2017towards}, who also propose an alternative direction to avoid the caveats in the minmax two-player training of GANs. The corresponding algorithm, called Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), hinges on the 1-Lipschitz continuity of the discriminator. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enforcing the Lipschitz continuity in the training procedure of WGANs. Our approach seamlessly connects WGAN with one of the …
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕大学）
Synthetic data is an emerging technology that can significantly accelerate the development and deployment of AI machine learning pipelines. In this work, we develop high-fidelity time-series generators, the SigWGAN, by combining continuous-time stochastic models with the newly proposed signature $W_1$ metric. The former are the Logsig-RNN models based on the stochastic differential equations, whereas the latter originates from the universal and principled mathematical features to characterize the measure induced by time series. SigWGAN allows turning computationally challenging GAN min-max pro…
Coordinated Science Laboratory, UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校协同科学实验室）；Technicolor AI Lab（Technicolor人工智能实验室）
We provide a framework to approximate the 2-Wasserstein distance and the optimal transport map, amenable to efficient training as well as statistical and geometric analysis. With the quadratic cost and considering the Kantorovich dual form of the optimal transportation problem, the Brenier theorem states that the optimal potential function is convex and the optimal transport map is the gradient of the optimal potential function. Using this geometric structure, we restrict the optimization problem to different parametrized classes of convex functions and pay special attention to the class of in…
While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have empirically produced impressive results on learning complex real-world distributions, recent works have shown that they suffer from lack of diversity or mode collapse. The theoretical work of Arora et al. suggests a dilemma about GANs' statistical properties: powerful discriminators cause overfitting, whereas weak discriminators cannot detect mode collapse. By contrast, we show in this paper that GANs can in principle learn distributions in Wasserstein distance (or KL-divergence in many cases) with polynomial sample complexity, if the discrimin…
A popular heuristic for improved performance in Generative adversarial networks (GANs) is to use some form of gradient penalty on the discriminator. This gradient penalty was originally motivated by a Wasserstein distance formulation. However, the use of gradient penalty in other GAN formulations is not well motivated. We present a unifying framework of expected margin maximization and show that a wide range of gradient-penalized GANs (e.g., Wasserstein, Standard, Least-Squares, and Hinge GANs) can be derived from this framework. Our results imply that employing gradient penalties induces a la…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Sciences（马克斯·普朗克数学科学研究所）
We introduce a new method for training generative adversarial networks by applying the Wasserstein-2 metric proximal on the generators. The approach is based on Wasserstein information geometry. It defines a parametrization invariant natural gradient by pulling back optimal transport structures from probability space to parameter space. We obtain easy-to-implement iterative regularizers for the parameter updates of implicit deep generative models. Our experiments demonstrate that this method improves the speed and stability of training in terms of wall-clock time and Fréchet Inception Distance…
Wasserstein GANs with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) are a very popular method for training generative models to produce high quality synthetic data. While WGAN-GP were initially developed to calculate the Wasserstein 1 distance between generated and real data, recent works (e.g. [23]) have provided empirical evidence that this does not occur, and have argued that WGAN-GP perform well not in spite of this issue, but because of it. In this paper we show for the first time that WGAN-GP compute the minimum of a different optimal transport problem, the so-called congested transport [7]. Congested tran…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are one of the most popular approaches when it comes to training generative models, among which variants of Wasserstein GANs are considered superior to the standard GAN formulation in terms of learning stability and sample quality. However, Wasserstein GANs require the critic to be 1-Lipschitz, which is often enforced implicitly by penalizing the norm of its gradient, or by globally restricting its Lipschitz constant via weight normalization techniques. Training with a regularization term penalizing the violation of the Lipschitz constraint explicitly, in…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Max Planck Institute（马克斯·普朗克研究所）
We propose a stable method to train Wasserstein generative adversarial networks. In order to enhance stability, we consider two objective functions using the $c$-transform based on Kantorovich duality which arises in the theory of optimal transport. We experimentally show that this algorithm can effectively enforce the Lipschitz constraint on the discriminator while other standard methods fail to do so. As a consequence, our method yields an accurate estimation for the optimal discriminator and also for the Wasserstein distance between the true distribution and the generated one. Our method re…
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata（印度统计研究所（加尔各答））
The introduction of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) has been marked as a breakthrough in the history of representation learning models. Besides having several accolades of its own, VAE has successfully flagged off a series of inventions in the form of its immediate successors. Wasserstein Autoencoder (WAE), being an heir to that realm carries with it all of the goodness and heightened generative promises, matching even the generative adversarial networks (GANs). Needless to say, recent years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence in statistical analyses of the GANs. Similar examinations for Aut…
We investigate under and overfitting in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), using discriminators unseen by the generator to measure generalization. We find that the model capacity of the discriminator has a significant effect on the generator's model quality, and that the generator's poor performance coincides with the discriminator underfitting. Contrary to our expectations, we find that generators with large model capacities relative to the discriminator do not show evidence of overfitting on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and CelebA.
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
In the recent years Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated significant progress in generating authentic looking data. In this work we introduce our simple method to exploit the advancements in well established image-based GANs to synthesise single channel time series data. We implement Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) with gradient penalty due to their stability in training to synthesise three different types of data; sinusoidal data, photoplethysmograph (PPG) data and electrocardiograph (ECG) data. The length of the returned time series data is limited only by the image resolution, …
It has long been thought that high-dimensional data encountered in many practical machine learning tasks have low-dimensional structure, i.e., the manifold hypothesis holds. A natural question, thus, is to estimate the intrinsic dimension of a given population distribution from a finite sample. We introduce a new estimator of the intrinsic dimension and provide finite sample, non-asymptotic guarantees. We then apply our techniques to get new sample complexity bounds for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) depending only on the intrinsic dimension of the data.
Obtaining reliable data describing local poverty metrics at a granularity that is informative to policy-makers requires expensive and logistically difficult surveys, particularly in the developing world. Not surprisingly, the poverty stricken regions are also the ones which have a high probability of being a war zone, have poor infrastructure and sometimes have governments that do not cooperate with internationally funded development efforts. We train a CNN on free and publicly available daytime satellite images of the African continent from Landsat 7 to build a model for predicting local econ…
Generative adversarial network (GAN) is a minimax game between a generator mimicking the true model and a discriminator distinguishing the samples produced by the generator from the real training samples. Given an unconstrained discriminator able to approximate any function, this game reduces to finding the generative model minimizing a divergence measure, e.g. the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence, to the data distribution. However, in practice the discriminator is constrained to be in a smaller class $\mathcal{F}$ such as neural nets. Then, a natural question is how the divergence minimization …
On optimal solutions of classical and sliced Wasserstein GANs with non-Gaussian data
Dept. of Applied Math., Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA（应用数学系，科罗拉多大学，伯尔德，科罗拉多州，80309，美国）；Department of EE and GICE, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan（电子工程系和信息科学与工程系，国立台湾大学，台北，台湾）；Institute of Communications Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, HsinChu, Taiwan（通讯工程研究所，国立阳明交通大学，新竹，台湾）；Bosch Center for AI, USA（博世人工智能中心，美国）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown great promise in modeling high dimensional data. The learning objective of GANs usually minimizes some measure discrepancy, \textit{e.g.}, $f$-divergence~($f$-GANs) or Integral Probability Metric~(Wasserstein GANs). With $f$-divergence as the objective function, the discriminator essentially estimates the density ratio, and the estimated ratio proves useful in further improving the sample quality of the generator. However, how to leverage the information contained in the discriminator of Wasserstein GANs (WGAN) is less explored. In this paper, …
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
We introduce the decision-aware time-series conditional generative adversarial network (DAT-CGAN) as a method for time-series generation. The framework adopts a multi-Wasserstein loss on structured decision-related quantities, capturing the heterogeneity of decision-related data and providing new effectiveness in supporting the decision processes of end users. We improve sample efficiency through an overlapped block-sampling method, and provide a theoretical characterization of the generalization properties of DAT-CGAN. The framework is demonstrated on financial time series for a multi-time-st…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Building on the success of deep learning, two modern approaches to learn a probability model from the data are Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs). VAEs consider an explicit probability model for the data and compute a generative distribution by maximizing a variational lower-bound on the log-likelihood function. GANs, however, compute a generative model by minimizing a distance between observed and generated probability distributions without considering an explicit model for the observed data. The lack of having explicit probability models in GANs prohib…
Arguably the most fundamental question in the theory of generative adversarial networks (GANs) is to understand to what extent GANs can actually learn the underlying distribution. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests local optimality of the empirical training objective is insufficient. Yet, it does not rule out the possibility that achieving a true population minimax optimal solution might imply distribution learning. In this paper, we show that standard cryptographic assumptions imply that this stronger condition is still insufficient. Namely, we show that if local pseudorandom generat…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Zhongnan University of Economics and Law（中南财经政法大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Duke-NUS Medical School（杜克-新加坡国立大学医学院）
To address the challenges in learning deep generative models (e.g.,the blurriness of variational auto-encoder and the instability of training generative adversarial networks, we propose a novel deep generative model, named Wasserstein-Wasserstein auto-encoders (WWAE). We formulate WWAE as minimization of the penalized optimal transport between the target distribution and the generated distribution. By noticing that both the prior $P_Z$ and the aggregated posterior $Q_Z$ of the latent code Z can be well captured by Gaussians, the proposed WWAE utilizes the closed-form of the squared Wasserstein…
In this paper, we investigate the underlying factor that leads to failure and success in the training of GANs. We study the property of the optimal discriminative function and show that in many GANs, the gradient from the optimal discriminative function is not reliable, which turns out to be the fundamental cause of failure in training of GANs. We further demonstrate that a well-defined distance metric does not necessarily guarantee the convergence of GANs. Finally, we prove in this paper that Lipschitz-continuity condition is a general solution to make the gradient of the optimal discriminati…
Real-time estimation of actual environment depth is an essential module for various autonomous system tasks such as localization, obstacle detection and pose estimation. During the last decade of machine learning, extensive deployment of deep learning methods to computer vision tasks yielded successful approaches for realistic depth synthesis out of a simple RGB modality. While most of these models rest on paired depth data or availability of video sequences and stereo images, there is a lack of methods facing single-image depth synthesis in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, in this study, la…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been promising in the field of image generation, however, they have been hard to train for language generation. GANs were originally designed to output differentiable values, so discrete language generation is challenging for them which causes high levels of instability in training GANs. Consequently, past work has resorted to pre-training with maximum-likelihood or training GANs without pre-training with a WGAN objective with a gradient penalty. In this study, we present a comparison of those approaches. Furthermore, we present the results of some e…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
In this work, we train conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial networks to effectively sample from the posterior of physics-based Bayesian inference problems. The generator is constructed using a U-Net architecture, with the latent information injected using conditional instance normalization. The former facilitates a multiscale inverse map, while the latter enables the decoupling of the latent space dimension from the dimension of the measurement, and introduces stochasticity at all scales of the U-Net. We solve PDE-based inverse problems to demonstrate the performance of our approach …
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved a great success in unsupervised learning. Despite its remarkable empirical performance, there are limited theoretical studies on the statistical properties of GANs. This paper provides approximation and statistical guarantees of GANs for the estimation of data distributions that have densities in a Hölder space. Our main result shows that, if the generator and discriminator network architectures are properly chosen, GANs are consistent estimators of data distributions under strong discrepancy metrics, such as the Wasserstein-1 distance. Furt…
Class imbalance is a common problem in supervised learning and impedes the predictive performance of classification models. Popular countermeasures include oversampling the minority class. Standard methods like SMOTE rely on finding nearest neighbours and linear interpolations which are problematic in case of high-dimensional, complex data distributions. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been proposed as an alternative method for generating artificial minority examples as they can model complex distributions. However, prior research on GAN-based oversampling does not incorporate rece…
In this paper, we study the convergence of generative adversarial networks (GANs) from the perspective of the informativeness of the gradient of the optimal discriminative function. We show that GANs without restriction on the discriminative function space commonly suffer from the problem that the gradient produced by the discriminator is uninformative to guide the generator. By contrast, Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), where the discriminative function is restricted to 1-Lipschitz, does not suffer from such a gradient uninformativeness problem. We further show in the paper that the model with a compa…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) excel at creating realistic images with complex models for which maximum likelihood is infeasible. However, the convergence of GAN training has still not been proved. We propose a two time-scale update rule (TTUR) for training GANs with stochastic gradient descent on arbitrary GAN loss functions. TTUR has an individual learning rate for both the discriminator and the generator. Using the theory of stochastic approximation, we prove that the TTUR converges under mild assumptions to a stationary local Nash equilibrium. The convergence carries over to the po…
This paper explains the math behind a generative adversarial network (GAN) model and why it is hard to be trained. Wasserstein GAN is intended to improve GANs' training by adopting a smooth metric for measuring the distance between two probability distributions.
Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) and normalizing flows are both approaches to density estimation that use deep neural networks to transform samples from an uninformative prior distribution to an approximation of the data distribution. There is great interest in both for general-purpose statistical modeling, but the two approaches have seldom been compared to each other for modeling non-image data. The difficulty of computing likelihoods with GANs, which are implicit models, makes conducting such a comparison challenging. We work around this difficulty by considering several low-dimension…
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学数学研究所）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；Stanford（斯坦福大学）
Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are a staple of mathematical modelling of temporal dynamics. However, a fundamental limitation has been that such models have typically been relatively inflexible, which recent work introducing Neural SDEs has sought to solve. Here, we show that the current classical approach to fitting SDEs may be approached as a special case of (Wasserstein) GANs, and in doing so the neural and classical regimes may be brought together. The input noise is Brownian motion, the output samples are time-evolving paths produced by a numerical solver, and by parameterising …
We examined the use of modern Generative Adversarial Nets to generate novel images of oil paintings using the Painter By Numbers dataset. We implemented Spectral Normalization GAN (SN-GAN) and Spectral Normalization GAN with Gradient Penalty, and compared their outputs to a Deep Convolutional GAN. Visually, and quantitatively according to the Sliced Wasserstein Distance metric, we determined that the SN-GAN produced paintings that were most comparable to our training dataset. We then performed a series of experiments to add supervised conditioning to SN-GAN, the culmination of which is what we…
In optimization, the negative gradient of a function denotes the direction of steepest descent. Furthermore, traveling in any direction orthogonal to the gradient maintains the value of the function. In this work, we show that these orthogonal directions that are ignored by gradient descent can be critical in equilibrium problems. Equilibrium problems have drawn heightened attention in machine learning due to the emergence of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We use the framework of Variational Inequalities to analyze popular training algorithms for a fundamental GAN variant: the Wasse…
