Papers with Code - TransGAN: Two Transformers Can Make One Strong GAN

The recent explosive interest on transformers has suggested their potential to become powerful "universal" models for computer vision tasks, such as classification, detection, and segmentation. However, how further transformers can go - are they ready to take some more notoriously difficult vision tasks, e.g., generative adversarial networks (GANs)?.. Driven by that curiosity, we conduct the first pilot study in building a GAN \textbf{completely free of convolutions}, using only pure transformer-based architectures. Our vanilla GAN architecture, dubbed \textbf{TransGAN}, consists of a memory-friendly transformer-based generator that progressively increases feature resolution while decreasing embedding dimension, and a patch-level discriminator that is also transformer-based. We then demonstrate TransGAN to notably benefit from data augmentations (more than standard GANs), a multi-task co-training strategy for the generator, and a locally initialized self-attention that emphasizes the neighborhood smoothness of natural images. Equipped with those findings, TransGAN can effectively scale up with bigger models and high-resolution image datasets.