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Is Generator Conditioning Causally Related to GAN Performance? [pdf] (arxiv.org)
1 point by stablemap on Feb 27, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tracked how much a picture generator stretches or squeezes its input directions during training, and found this measure closely matches the usual image-quality scores. Adding a penalty for bad stretching improved those scores and made them far more consistent across runs.

Abstract · Is Generator Conditioning Causally Related to GAN Performance?

Recent work (Pennington et al, 2017) suggests that controlling the entire distribution of Jacobian singular values is an important design consideration in deep learning. Motivated by this, we study the distribution of singular values of the Jacobian of the generator in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We find that this Jacobian generally becomes ill-conditioned at the beginning of training. Moreover, we find that the average (with z from p(z)) conditioning of the generator is highly predictive of two other ad-hoc metrics for measuring the 'quality' of trained GANs: the Inception Score and the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). We test the hypothesis that this relationship is causal by proposing a 'regularization' technique (called Jacobian Clamping) that softly penalizes the condition number of the generator Jacobian. Jacobian Clamping improves the mean Inception Score and the mean FID for GANs trained on several datasets. It also greatly reduces inter-run variance of the aforementioned scores, addressing (at least partially) one of the main criticisms of GANs.

Augustus Odena, Jacob Buckman, Catherine Olsson, Tom B. Brown, Christopher Olah, Colin Raffel, Ian Goodfellow
arXiv:1802.08768 · stat.ML, cs.LG · submitted Feb 23, 2018 · updated Jun 19, 2018
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