With the rapidly growing model complexity and data volume, training deep generative models (DGMs) for better performance has becoming an increasingly more important challenge. Previous research on this problem has mainly focused on improving DGMs by either introducing new objective functions or designing more expressive model architectures. However, such approaches often introduce significantly more computational and/or designing overhead. To resolve such issues, we introduce in this paper a generic framework called {\em generative-model inference} that is capable of enhancing pre-trained GANs effectively and seamlessly in a variety of application scenarios. Our basic idea is to efficiently infer the optimal latent distribution for the given requirements using Wasserstein gradient flow techniques, instead of re-training or fine-tuning pre-trained model parameters. Extensive experimental results on applications like image generation, image translation, text-to-image generation, image inpainting, and text-guided image editing suggest the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework.
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
In this paper, we study the problem of multi-domain image generation, the goal of which is to generate pairs of corresponding images from different domains. With the recent development in generative models, image generation has achieved great progress and has been applied to various computer vision tasks. However, multi-domain image generation may not achieve the desired performance due to the difficulty of learning the correspondence of different domain images, especially when the information of paired samples is not given. To tackle this problem, we propose Regularized Conditional GAN (RegCG…
Syracuse University（雪城大学）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；Duke University（杜克大学）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
Despite the growing interest in generative adversarial networks (GANs), training GANs remains a challenging problem, both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel way to exploit the unique geometry of the real data, especially the manifold information. More specifically, we design a method to regularize GAN training by adding an additional regularization term referred to as manifold regularizer. The manifold regularizer forces the generator to respect the unique geometry of the real data manifold and generate high quality data.…
We enhance the vanilla adversarial training method for unsupervised Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) by a diffusion-GAN. Our model (1) injects instance noises of various intensities to the generator's output and unlabeled reference text which are sampled from pretrained phoneme language models with a length constraint, (2) asks diffusion timestep-dependent discriminators to separate them, and (3) back-propagates the gradients to update the generator. Word/phoneme error rate comparisons with wav2vec-U under Librispeech (3.1% for test-clean and 5.6% for test-other), TIMIT and MLS datasets, sho…
University of Louisville（路易斯维尔大学）；University of Social Science（社会科学大学）
The two key players in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the discriminator and generator, are usually parameterized as deep neural networks (DNNs). On many generative tasks, GANs achieve state-of-the-art performance but are often unstable to train and sometimes miss modes. A typical failure mode is the collapse of the generator to a single parameter configuration where its outputs are identical. When this collapse occurs, the gradient of the discriminator may point in similar directions for many similar points. We hypothesize that some of these shortcomings are in part due to primitive a…
Monash University Malaysia（莫纳什大学马来西亚分校）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Common measures of brain functional connectivity (FC) including covariance and correlation matrices are semi-positive definite (SPD) matrices residing on a cone-shape Riemannian manifold. Despite its remarkable success for Euclidean-valued data generation, use of standard generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate manifold-valued FC data neglects its inherent SPD structure and hence the inter-relatedness of edges in real FC. We propose a novel graph-regularized manifold-aware conditional Wasserstein GAN (GR-SPD-GAN) for FC data generation on the SPD manifold that can preserve the globa…
Lipschitz continuity recently becomes popular in generative adversarial networks (GANs). It was observed that the Lipschitz regularized discriminator leads to improved training stability and sample quality. The mainstream implementations of Lipschitz continuity include gradient penalty and spectral normalization. In this paper, we demonstrate that gradient penalty introduces undesired bias, while spectral normalization might be over restrictive. We accordingly propose a new method which is efficient and unbiased. Our experiments verify our analysis and show that the proposed method is able to …
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a revolutionary class of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have been successfully used to generate realistic images, music, text, and other data. However, GAN training presents many challenges, notably it can be very resource-intensive. A potential weakness in GANs is that it requires a lot of data for successful training and data collection can be an expensive process. Typically, the corrective feedback from discriminator DNNs to generator DNNs (namely, the discriminator's assessment of the generated example) is calculated using only one real-numbered…
Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR)（磁共振研究中心）；University of Minnesota Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）
k-space undersampling is a standard technique to accelerate MR image acquisitions. Reconstruction techniques including GeneRalized Autocalibrating Partial Parallel Acquisition(GRAPPA) and its variants are utilized extensively in clinical and research settings. A reconstruction model combining GRAPPA with a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) was developed and tested on multi-coil human brain images from the fastMRI dataset. For various acceleration rates, GAN and GRAPPA reconstructions were compared in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). Fo…
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…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gained momentum for their ability to model image distributions. They learn to emulate the training set and that enables sampling from that domain and using the knowledge learned for useful applications. Several methods proposed enhancing GANs, including regularizing the loss with some feature matching. We seek to push GANs beyond the data in the training and try to explore unseen territory in the image manifold. We first propose a new regularizer for GAN based on K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) selective feature matching to a target set Y in high-level fea…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Generative adversarial nets (GANs) have been remarkably successful at learning to sample from distributions specified by a given dataset, particularly if the given dataset is reasonably large compared to its dimensionality. However, given limited data, classical GANs have struggled, and strategies like output-regularization, data-augmentation, use of pre-trained models and pruning have been shown to lead to improvements. Notably, the applicability of these strategies is 1) often constrained to particular settings, e.g., availability of a pretrained GAN; or 2) increases training time, e.g., whe…
While data sharing is crucial for knowledge development, privacy concerns and strict regulation (e.g., European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) limit its full effectiveness. Synthetic tabular data emerges as alternative to enable data sharing while fulfilling regulatory and privacy constraints. State-of-the-art tabular data synthesizers draw methodologies from Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). As GANs improve the synthesized data increasingly resemble the real data risking to leak privacy. Differential privacy (DP) provides theoretical guarantees on privacy loss but degrades da…
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学库理计算机学院）；Department of Mathematics, Northeastern University（东北大学数学系）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to be powerful and flexible priors when solving inverse problems. One challenge of using them is overcoming representation error, the fundamental limitation of the network in representing any particular signal. Recently, multiple proposed inversion algorithms reduce representation error by optimizing over intermediate layer representations. These methods are typically applied to generative models that were trained agnostic of the downstream inversion algorithm. In our work, we introduce a principle that if a generative model is intended fo…
This review presents a comprehensive study on the role of GANs in addressing the challenges related to COVID-19 data scarcity and diagnosis. It is the first review that summarizes the different GANs methods and the lungs images datasets for COVID-19. It attempts to answer the questions related to applications of GANs, popular GAN architectures, frequently used image modalities, and the availability of source code. This review included 57 full-text studies that reported the use of GANs for different applications in COVID-19 lungs images data. Most of the studies (n=42) used GANs for data augmen…
Facial attractiveness enhancement has been an interesting application in Computer Vision and Graphics over these years. It aims to generate a more attractive face via manipulations on image and geometry structure while preserving face identity. In this paper, we propose the first Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for enhancing facial attractiveness in both geometry and appearance aspects, which we call "FA-GANs". FA-GANs contain two branches and enhance facial attractiveness in two perspectives: facial geometry and facial appearance. Each branch consists of individual GANs with the appear…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Although Generative Adversarial Networks achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of generative tasks, they are regarded as highly unstable and prone to miss modes. We argue that these bad behaviors of GANs are due to the very particular functional shape of the trained discriminators in high dimensional spaces, which can easily make training stuck or push probability mass in the wrong direction, towards that of higher concentration than that of the data generating distribution. We introduce several ways of regularizing the objective, which can dramatically stabilize the training of GAN mo…
Most current computer vision datasets are composed of disconnected sets, such as images from different classes. We prove that distributions of this type of data cannot be represented with a continuous generative network without error. They can be represented in two ways: With an ensemble of networks or with a single network with truncated latent space. We show that ensembles are more desirable than truncated distributions in practice. We construct a regularized optimization problem that establishes the relationship between a single continuous GAN, an ensemble of GANs, conditional GANs, and Gau…
Current approaches have made great progress on image-to-image translation tasks benefiting from the success of image synthesis methods especially generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, existing methods are limited to handling translation tasks between two species while keeping the content matching on the semantic level. A more challenging task would be the translation among more than two species. To explore this new area, we propose a simple yet effective structure of a multi-branch discriminator for enhancing an arbitrary generative adversarial architecture (GAN), named GAN-MBD. It …
Department of ECE and the Visual Narrative Initiative, North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学电气与计算机工程系及视觉叙事研究所）
Image synthesis and image-to-image translation are two important generative learning tasks. Remarkable progress has been made by learning Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)~\cite{goodfellow2014generative} and cycle-consistent GANs (CycleGANs)~\cite{zhu2017unpaired} respectively. This paper presents a method of learning Spatial Pyramid Attentive Pooling (SPAP) which is a novel architectural unit and can be easily integrated into both generators and discriminators in GANs and CycleGANs. The proposed SPAP integrates Atrous spatial pyramid~\cite{chen2018deeplab}, a proposed cascade attention m…
École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS)（高等技术学院）；Université du Québec（魁北克大学）
In this paper we address the instability issue of generative adversarial network (GAN) by proposing a new similarity metric in unitary space of Schur decomposition for 2D representations of audio and speech signals. We show that encoding departure from normality computed in this vector space into the generator optimization formulation helps to craft more comprehensive spectrograms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of binding this metric for enhancing stability in training with less mode collapse compared to baseline GANs. Experimental results on subsets of UrbanSound8k and Mozilla common voice…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（产业技术综合研究所）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
Unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation has received considerable attention in pattern recognition and computer vision because of recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, due to the lack of explicit supervision, unpaired I2I models often fail to generate realistic images, especially in challenging datasets with different backgrounds and poses. Hence, stabilization is indispensable for GANs and applications of I2I translation. Herein, we propose Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization (ACCR), a novel regularization method for unpaired I2I translation. Our ma…
Deep unfolding of MCMC kernels: scalable, modular & explainable GANs for high-dimensional posterior sampling
Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences（麦克斯韦数学科学研究所）；School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学数学与计算机科学学院）；School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学数学学院）
IIT Delhi（德里印度理工学院）；Flipkart Internet Pvt. Ltd.（Flipkart互联网私人有限公司）；TIFR（塔塔基础研究院）
The field of neural generative models is dominated by the highly successful Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) despite their challenges, such as training instability and mode collapse. Auto-Encoders (AE) with regularized latent space provide an alternative framework for generative models, albeit their performance levels have not reached that of GANs. In this work, we hypothesise that the dimensionality of the AE model's latent space has a critical effect on the quality of generated data. Under the assumption that nature generates data by sampling from a "true" generative latent space follo…
Regularized Auto-Encoders (RAEs) form a rich class of neural generative models. They effectively model the joint-distribution between the data and the latent space using an Encoder-Decoder combination, with regularization imposed in terms of a prior over the latent space. Despite their advantages, such as stability in training, the performance of AE based models has not reached the superior standards as that of the other generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Motivated by this, we examine the effect of the latent prior on the generation quality of deterministic AE mo…
Tabular data synthesis has received wide attention in the literature. This is because available data is often limited, incomplete, or cannot be obtained easily, and data privacy is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we present a generalized GAN framework for tabular synthesis, which combines the adversarial training of GANs and the negative log-density regularization of invertible neural networks. The proposed framework can be used for two distinctive objectives. First, we can further improve the synthesis quality, by decreasing the negative log-density of real records in the proce…
We investigate the effectiveness of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for speech enhancement, in the context of improving noise robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Prior work demonstrates that GANs can effectively suppress additive noise in raw waveform speech signals, improving perceptual quality metrics; however this technique was not justified in the context of ASR. In this work, we conduct a detailed study to measure the effectiveness of GANs in enhancing speech contaminated by both additive and reverberant noise. Motivated by recent advances in image processing,…
Megvii (Face++) USA（旷视（Face++）美国）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, CUHK(SZ)（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳大数据研究院）
Generating plausible hair image given limited guidance, such as sparse sketches or low-resolution image, has been made possible with the rise of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Traditional image-to-image translation networks can generate recognizable results, but finer textures are usually lost and blur artifacts commonly exist. In this paper, we propose a two-phase generative model for high-quality hair image synthesis. The two-phase pipeline first generates a coarse image by an existing image translation model, then applies a re-generating network with self-enhancing capability to th…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；DeepMind
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the image domain. However, GANs are limited in two ways. They often learn distributions with low support---a phenomenon known as mode collapse---and they do not guarantee the existence of a probability density, which makes evaluating generalization using predictive log-likelihood impossible. In this paper, we develop the prescribed GAN (PresGAN) to address these shortcomings. PresGANs add noise to the output of a density network and optimize an entropy-reg…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies（马里兰大学高级计算机研究所）
In recent years, neural network approaches have been widely adopted for machine learning tasks, with applications in computer vision. More recently, unsupervised generative models based on neural networks have been successfully applied to model data distributions via low-dimensional latent spaces. In this paper, we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to impose structure in compressed sensing problems, replacing the usual sparsity constraint. We propose to train the GANs in a task-aware fashion, specifically for reconstruction tasks. We also show that it is possible to train our model wi…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most practical methods for learning data distributions. A popular GAN formulation is based on the use of Wasserstein distance as a metric between probability distributions. Unfortunately, minimizing the Wasserstein distance between the data distribution and the generative model distribution is a computationally challenging problem as its objective is non-convex, non-smooth, and even hard to compute. In this work, we show that obtaining gradient information of the smoothed Wasserstein GAN formulation, which is based on regularized Optimal Tr…
Low light image enhancement is an important challenge for the development of robust computer vision algorithms. The machine learning approaches to this have been either unsupervised, supervised based on paired dataset or supervised based on unpaired dataset. This paper presents a novel deep learning pipeline that can learn from both paired and unpaired datasets. Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) that are optimized to minimize standard loss, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that are optimized to minimize the adversarial loss are used to achieve different steps of the low light image …
CUHK（香港中文大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；CUHK (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Adobe Inc.（奥多比公司）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have made great success in image inpainting yet still have difficulties tackling large missing regions. In contrast, iterative probabilistic algorithms, such as autoregressive and denoising diffusion models, have to be deployed with massive computing resources for decent effect. To achieve high-quality results with low computational cost, we present a novel pixel spread model (PSM) that iteratively employs decoupled probabilistic modeling, combining the optimization efficiency of GANs with the prediction tractability of probabilistic models. As a result, …
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of California Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Waymo；Yonsei University（延世大学）
Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, the success of the GAN models hinges on a large amount of training data. This work proposes a regularization approach for training robust GAN models on limited data. We theoretically show a connection between the regularized loss and an f-divergence called LeCam-divergence, which we find is more robust under limited training data. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed regularization scheme 1) improves the generalization performance and stabilizes the le…
Modeling Eye Gaze Velocity Trajectories using GANs with Spectral Loss for Enhanced Fidelity
OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University（奥斯陆met大学）；OsloMet Artificial Intelligence Lab（奥斯陆met人工智能实验室）；NordSTAR – Nordic Center for Sustainable and Trustworthy AI Research（北欧可持续和可信AI研究中心）；Simula Research Laboratory（simula研究实验室）
In just a few years, the photo-realism of images synthesized by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has gone from somewhat reasonable to almost perfect largely by increasing the complexity of the networks, e.g., adding layers, intermediate latent spaces, style-transfer parameters, etc. This trajectory has led many of the state-of-the-art GANs to be inaccessibly large, disengaging many without large computational resources. Recognizing this, we explore a method for squeezing additional performance from existing, low-complexity GANs. Formally, we present an unsupervised method to find a direc…
Generative adversarial learning with optimal input dimension and its adaptive generator architecture
New Cornerstone Science Laboratory（新基石科学实验室）；Center of Statistical Research（统计研究中心）；School of Statistics（统计学院）；Southwestern University of Finance and Economics（西南财经大学）
本文提出 G-GANs 框架，通过组惩罚与架构惩罚自适应选择最优输入维度和生成器结构，提升 GAN 训练稳定性与生成精度，并在多个基准上取得显著性能改进。
