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1. PacGAN: The power of two samples in generative adversarial networks

   Lin, Zinan; Khetan, Ashish; Fanti, Giulia; Oh, Sewoong (December 2018, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are innovative techniques for learning generative models of complex data distributions from samples. Despite remarkable recent improvements in generating realistic images, one of their major shortcomings is the fact that in practice, they tend to produce samples with little diversity, even when trained on diverse datasets. This phenomenon, known as mode collapse, has been the main focus of several recent advances in GANs. Yet there is little understanding of why mode collapse happens and why recently proposed approaches are able to mitigate mode collapse. We propose a principled approach to handling mode collapse, which we call packing. The main idea is to modify the discriminator to make decisions based on multiple samples from the same class, either real or artificially generated. We borrow analysis tools from binary hypothesis testing—in particular the seminal result of Blackwell [6]—to prove a fundamental connection between packing and mode collapse. We show that packing naturally penalizes generators with mode collapse, thereby favoring generator distributions with less mode collapse during the training process. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets suggests that packing provides significant improvements in practice as well. 

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2. HGAN: Hybrid generative adversarial network

   https://doi.org/10.3233/JIFS-201202  

   Iranmanesh, Seyed Mehdi; Nasrabadi, Nasser M. (April 2021, Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems)

   In this paper, we present a simple approach to train Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in order to avoid a mode collapse issue. Implicit models such as GANs tend to generate better samples compared to explicit models that are trained on tractable data likelihood. However, GANs overlook the explicit data density characteristics which leads to undesirable quantitative evaluations and mode collapse. To bridge this gap, we propose a hybrid generative adversarial network (HGAN) for which we can enforce data density estimation via an autoregressive model and support both adversarial and likelihood framework in a joint training manner which diversify the estimated density in order to cover different modes. We propose to use an adversarial network to transfer knowledge from an autoregressive model (teacher) to the generator (student) of a GAN model. A novel deep architecture within the GAN formulation is developed to adversarially distill the autoregressive model information in addition to simple GAN training approach. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets (i.e., MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HGAN under qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The experimental results show the superiority and competitiveness of our method compared to the baselines. 

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3. AE-OT: A new generative Model Based on Extended Semi-discrete Optimal Transport

   An, Dongsheng; Guo, Yang; Lei, Na; Luo, Zhongxuan; Yau, Shing-Tung; Gu, Xianfeng. (January 2019, ICLR 2020)

   Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have attracted huge attention due to its capability to generate visual realistic images. However, most of the existing models suffer from the mode collapse or mode mixture problems. In this work, we give a theoretic explanation of the both problems by Figalli’s regularity theory of optimal transportation maps. Basically, the generator compute the transportation maps between the white noise distributions and the data distributions, which are in general discontinuous. However, DNNs can only represent continuous maps. This intrinsic conflict induces mode collapse and mode mixture. In order to tackle the both problems, we explicitly separate the manifold embedding and the optimal transportation; the first part is carried out using an autoencoder to map the images onto the latent space; the second part is accomplished using a GPU-based convex optimization to find the discontinuous transportation maps. Composing the extended OT map and the decoder, we can finally generate new images from the white noise. This AE-OT model avoids representing discontinuous maps by DNNs, therefore effectively prevents mode collapse and mode mixture. 

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4. BourGAN: Generative Networks with Metric Embeddings

   Xiao, Chang; Zhong, Peilin; Zheng, Changxi (December 2018, 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems)

   This paper addresses the mode collapse for generative adversarial networks (GANs). We view modes as a geometric structure of data distribution in a metric space. Under this geometric lens, we embed subsamples of the dataset from an arbitrary metric space into the L2 space, while preserving their pairwise distance distribution. Not only does this metric embedding determine the dimensionality of the latent space automatically, it also enables us to construct a mixture of Gaussians to draw latent space random vectors. We use the Gaussian mixture model in tandem with a simple augmentation of the objective function to train GANs. Every major step of our method is supported by theoretical analysis, and our experiments on real and synthetic data confirm that the generator is able to produce samples spreading over most of the modes while avoiding unwanted samples, outperforming several recent GAN variants on a number of metrics and offering new features. 

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5. BourGAN: Generative Networks with Metric Embeddings

   Xiao, Chang; Zhong, Peilin; Zheng, Changxi (December 2018, 32st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems)

   This paper addresses the mode collapse for generative adversarial networks (GANs). We view modes as a geometric structure of data distribution in a metric space. Under this geometric lens, we embed subsamples of the dataset from an arbitrary metric space into the L2 space, while preserving their pairwise distance distribution. Not only does this metric embedding determine the dimensionality of the latent space automatically, it also enables us to construct a mixture of Gaussians to draw latent space random vectors. We use the Gaussian mixture model in tandem with a simple augmentation of the objective function to train GANs. Every major step of our method is supported by theoretical analysis, and our experiments on real and synthetic data confirm that the generator is able to produce samples spreading over most of the modes while avoiding unwanted samples, outperforming several recent GAN variants on a number of metrics and offering new features. 

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