In plain words: A cleaner way to train image generators: a loss comparing fakes to real ones, fixing the collapse and instability that normally need hacks. With hacks gone and a modern backbone, it beats the popular generator it replaces on four datasets and rivals the best.
Abstract · The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline
There is a widely-spread claim that GANs are difficult to train, and GAN architectures in the literature are littered with empirical tricks. We provide evidence against this claim and build a modern GAN baseline in a more principled manner. First, we derive a well-behaved regularized relativistic GAN loss that addresses issues of mode dropping and non-convergence that were previously tackled via a bag of ad-hoc tricks. We analyze our loss mathematically and prove that it admits local convergence guarantees, unlike most existing relativistic losses. Second, our new loss allows us to discard all ad-hoc tricks and replace outdated backbones used in common GANs with modern architectures. Using StyleGAN2 as an example, we present a roadmap of simplification and modernization that results in a new minimalist baseline -- R3GAN. Despite being simple, our approach surpasses StyleGAN2 on FFHQ, ImageNet, CIFAR, and Stacked MNIST datasets, and compares favorably against state-of-the-art GANs and diffusion models.
Yiwen Huang, Aaron Gokaslan, Volodymyr Kuleshov, James Tompkin
arXiv:2501.05441 · cs.LG, cs.CV · submitted Jan 9, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to NeurIPS 2024. Code available at https://github.com/brownvc/R3GAN/