Generative Adversarial Networks - The Story So Far

When Ian Goodfellow dreamt up the idea of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) over a mug of beer back in 2014, he probably didn't expect to see the field advance so fast: In case you don't see where I'm going here, the images you just saw were utterly, undeniably, 100% … fake. Also, I don't mean these were photoshopped, CGI-ed, or (fill in the blanks with whatever Nvidia's calling their fancy new tech at the moment). I mean that these images are entirely generated through addition, multiplication, and splurging ludicrous amounts of cash on GPU computation. The algorithm that makes is stuff work is called a generative adversarial network (which is the long way of writing GAN, for those of you still stuck in machine learning acronym land), and over the last few years, there have been more innovations dedicated to making it work than there have been privacy scandals at Facebook. Summarizing every single improvement to the 2014 vanilla GANs is about as hard as watching season 8 of Game of Thrones on repeat. I'm not going to explain concepts like transposed convolutions and Wasserstein distance in detail. Instead, I'll provide links to some of the best resources you can use to quickly learn about these concepts so that you can see how they fit into the big picture. If you're still reading, I'm going to assume that you know the basics of deep learning and that you know how convolutional neural networks work.