More Like this

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 a technique for learning generative models of complex data distributions from samples. Despite remarkable advances in generating realistic images, a major shortcoming of GANs is the fact that they tend to produce samples with little diversity, even when trained on diverse datasets. This phenomenon, known as mode collapse, has been the focus of much recent work. We study 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 draw analysis tools from binary hypothesis testing—in particular the seminal result of Blackwell [4]—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 suggest that packing provides significant improvements. 

   more » « less
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. 

   more » « less
3. Inferential Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1111/rssb.12476  

   Chen, Yao ; Gao, Qingyi ; Wang, Xiao ( November 2021 , Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology)

   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 autoencoders and WGANs. The iWGAN model jointly learns an encoder network and a generator network motivated by the iterative primal-dual optimization process. The encoder network maps the observed samples to the latent space and the generator network maps the samples from the latent space to the data space. We establish the generalization error bound of the iWGAN to theoretically justify its performance. We further provide a rigorous probabilistic interpretation of our model under the framework of maximum likelihood estimation. The iWGAN, with a clear stopping criteria, has many advantages over other autoencoder GANs. The empirical experiments show that the iWGAN greatly mitigates the symptom of mode collapse, speeds up the convergence, and is able to provide a measurement of quality check for each individual sample. We illustrate the ability of the iWGAN by obtaining competitive and stable performances for benchmark datasets.

    

   more » « less
4. InfoGAN-CR and ModelCentrality: Self-supervised Model Training and Selection for Disentangling GANs

   Zinan Lin, Kiran Thekumparampil ( January 2020 , International Conference on Machine Learning)

   null (Ed.)

   Disentangled generative models map a latent code vector to a target space, while enforcing that a subset of the learned latent codes are interpretable and associated with distinct properties of the target distribution. Recent advances have been dominated by Variational AutoEncoder (VAE)-based methods, while training disentangled generative adversarial networks (GANs) remains challenging. In this work, we show that the dominant challenges facing disentangled GANs can be mitigated through the use of self-supervision. We make two main contributions: first, we design a novel approach for training disentangled GANs with self-supervision. We propose contrastive regularizer, which is inspired by a natural notion of disentanglement: latent traversal. This achieves higher disentanglement scores than state-of-the-art VAE- and GAN-based approaches. Second, we propose an unsupervised model selection scheme called ModelCentrality, which uses generated synthetic samples to compute the medoid (multi-dimensional generalization of median) of a collection of models. The current common practice of hyper-parameter tuning requires using ground-truths samples, each labelled with known perfect disentangled latent codes. As real datasets are not equipped with such labels, we propose an unsupervised model selection scheme and show that it finds a model close to the best one, for both VAEs and GANs. Combining contrastive regularization with ModelCentrality, we improve upon the state-of-the-art disentanglement scores significantly, without accessing the supervised data. 

   more » « less
5. The Vendi Score: A Diversity Evaluation Metric for Machine Learning

   Dan Friedman, Dan ; Dieng, Adji Bousso ( June 2023 , Transactions on machine learning research)

   Diversity is an important criterion for many areas of machine learning (ML), including generative modeling and dataset curation. However, existing metrics for measuring diversity are often domain-specific and limited in flexibility. In this paper we address the diversity evaluation problem by proposing the Vendi Score, which connects and extends ideas from ecology and quantum statistical mechanics to ml. The Vendi Score is defined as the exponential of the Shannon entropy of the eigenvalues of a similarity matrix. This matrix is induced by a user-defined similarity function applied to the sample to be evaluated for diversity. In taking a similarity function as input, the Vendi Score enables its user to specify any desired form of diversity. Importantly, unlike many existing metrics in ML, the Vendi Score does not require a reference dataset or distribution over samples or labels, it is therefore general and applicable to any generative model, decoding algorithm, and dataset from any domain where similarity can be defined. We showcase the Vendi Score on molecular generative modeling where we found it addresses shortcomings of the current diversity metric of choice in that domain. We also applied the Vendi Score to generative models of images and decoding algorithms of text where we found it confirms known results about diversity in those domains. Furthermore, we used the Vendi Score to measure mode collapse, a known shortcoming of generative adversarial networks (GANs). In particular, the Vendi Score revealed that even GANs that capture all the modes of a labelled dataset can be less diverse than the original dataset. Finally, the interpretability of the Vendi Score allowed us to diagnose several benchmark ML datasets for diversity, opening the door for diversity-informed data augmentation. 

   more » « less