In plain words: A stack of image generators turns a rough high-level description into finer and finer details, guided by a classifier's own features so each step stays realistic. It produced much higher quality images than a single generator that starts from one random noise vector.
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel generative model named Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (SGAN), which is trained to invert the hierarchical representations of a bottom-up discriminative network. Our model consists of a top-down stack of GANs, each learned to generate lower-level representations conditioned on higher-level representations. A representation discriminator is introduced at each feature hierarchy to encourage the representation manifold of the generator to align with that of the bottom-up discriminative network, leveraging the powerful discriminative representations to guide the generative model. In addition, we introduce a conditional loss that encourages the use of conditional information from the layer above, and a novel entropy loss that maximizes a variational lower bound on the conditional entropy of generator outputs. We first train each stack independently, and then train the whole model end-to-end. Unlike the original GAN that uses a single noise vector to represent all the variations, our SGAN decomposes variations into multiple levels and gradually resolves uncertainties in the top-down generative process. Based on visual inspection, Inception scores and visual Turing test, we demonstrate that SGAN is able to generate images of much higher quality than GANs without stacking.
Xun Huang, Yixuan Li, Omid Poursaeed, John Hopcroft, Serge Belongie
arXiv:1612.04357 · cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.NE, stat.ML · submitted Dec 13, 2016 · updated Apr 12, 2017
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