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Deep generative models have experienced great empirical successes in distribution learning. Many existing experiments have demonstrated that deep generative networks can efficiently generate high-dimensional complex data from a low-dimensional easy-to-sample distribution. However, this phenomenon can not be justified by existing theories. The widely held manifold hypothesis speculates that real-world data sets, such as natural images and signals, exhibit low-dimensional geometric structures. In this paper, we take such low-dimensional data structures into consideration by assuming that data distributions are supported on a low-dimensional manifold. We prove approximation and estimation theories of deep generative networks for estimating distributions on a low-dimensional manifold under the Wasserstein-1 loss. We show that the Wasserstein-1 loss converges to zero at a fast rate depending on the intrinsic dimension instead of the ambient data dimension. Our theory leverages the low-dimensional geometric structures in data sets and justifies the practical power of deep generative models. We require no smoothness assumptions on the data distribution which is desirable in practice.
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This content will become publicly available on November 19, 2025
Adaptive Learning of the Latent Space of Wasserstein Generative AdversarialNetworks
Generative models based on latent variables, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variationalauto-encoders (VAEs), have gained lots of interests due to their impressive performance in many fields.However, many data such as natural images usually do not populate the ambient Euclidean space but insteadreside in a lower-dimensional manifold. Thus an inappropriate choice of the latent dimension fails to uncoverthe structure of the data, possibly resulting in mismatch of latent representations and poor generativequalities. Toward addressing these problems, we propose a novel framework called the latent WassersteinGAN (LWGAN) that fuses the Wasserstein auto-encoder and the Wasserstein GAN so that the intrinsicdimension of the data manifold can be adaptively learned by a modified informative latent distribution. Weprove that there exist an encoder network and a generator network in such a way that the intrinsic dimensionof the learned encoding distribution is equal to the dimension of the data manifold. We theoreticallyestablish that our estimated intrinsic dimension is a consistent estimate of the true dimension of the datamanifold. Meanwhile, we provide an upper bound on the generalization error of LWGAN, implying that weforce the synthetic data distribution to be similar to the real data distribution from a population perspective.Comprehensive empirical experiments verify our framework and show that LWGAN is able to identify thecorrect intrinsic dimension under several scenarios, and simultaneously generate high-quality syntheticdata by sampling from the learned latent distribution. Supplementary materials for this article are availableonline, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2316428
- PAR ID:
- 10618852
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASA
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Volume:
- 120
- Issue:
- 550
- ISSN:
- 0162-1459
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1254-1266
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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