Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images. However, they are notoriously hard to train and can suffer from the problem of missing modes where the model is not able to produce examples in certain regions of the space. We propose an iterative procedure, called AdaGAN, where at every step we add a new component into a mixture model by running a GAN algorithm on a re-weighted sample. This is inspired by boosting algorithms, where many potentially weak individual predictors are greedily aggregated to form a strong composite predictor. We prove analytically that such an incremental procedure leads to convergence to the true distribution in a finite number of steps if each step is optimal, and convergence at an exponential rate otherwise. We also illustrate experimentally that this procedure addresses the problem of missing modes.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images.

AdaGAN is a meta-algorithm proposed for GAN. The key idea of AdaGAN is: at each step reweight the samples and fits a generative model on the reweighted samples. The final model is a weighted addition of the learned generative models. The main motivation is to reduce the mode-missing problem of GAN by reweighting samples at each step. It is claimed in the Introduction that AdaGAN can also use WGAN or mode-regularized GAN as base generators (line 55).

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Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images. However, they are notoriously hard to train and can suffer from the problem of missing modes where the model is not able to produce examples in certain regions of the space. We propose an iterative procedure, called AdaGAN, where at every step we add a new component into a mixture model by running a GAN algorithm on a re-weighted sample. This is inspired by boosting algorithms, where many potentially weak individual predictors are greedily aggregated to form a strong composite predictor. We prove analytically that such an incremental procedure leads to convergence to the true distribution in a finite number of steps if each step is optimal, and convergence at an exponential rate otherwise.

All generative models have to combat missing modes. The conventional wisdom is by reducing a statistical distance (such as f-divergence) between the generated distribution and the provided data distribution through training. We defy this wisdom. We show that even a small statistical distance does not imply a plausible mode coverage, because this distance measures a global similarity between two distributions, but not their similarity in local regions--which is needed to ensure a complete mode coverage. From a starkly different perspective, we view the battle against missing modes as a two-player game, between a player choosing a data point and an adversary choosing a generator aiming to cover that data point. Enlightened by von Neumann's minimax theorem, we see that if a generative model can approximate a data distribution moderately well under a global statistical distance measure, then we should be able to find a mixture of generators which collectively covers every data point and thus every mode with a lower-bounded probability density. A constructive realization of this minimax duality--that is, our proposed algorithm of finding the mixture of generators--is connected to a multiplicative weights update rule. We prove the pointwise coverage guarantee of our algorithm, and our experiments on real and synthetic data confirm better mode coverage over recent approaches that also use a mixture of generators but focus on global statistical distances.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images. However, they are notoriously hard to train and can suffer from the problem of missing modes where the model is not able to produce examples in certain regions of the space. We propose an iterative procedure, called AdaGAN, where at every step we add a new component into a mixture model by running a GAN algorithm on a re-weighted sample. This is inspired by boosting algorithms, where many potentially weak individual predictors are greedily aggregated to form a strong composite predictor. We prove analytically that such an incremental procedure leads to convergence to the true distribution in a finite number of steps if each step is optimal, and convergence at an exponential rate otherwise. We also illustrate experimentally that this procedure addresses the problem of missing modes.

Do we really need to have extensive results on MNIST, CIFAR, Imagenet, Celeba, ... to claim that a paper is convincing? This paper addresses a very specific issue of generative models, which is the fact that they mostly fail to demonstrate the same diversity as the original data. Their theoretical claims are clear, and to the best of my understanding, grounded. Their synthetic experiment pinpoints the variability problem of GANs, and demonstrate the superiority of their approach in this particular setup. What would an experiment on Imagenet add to their point?

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) (Goodfellow et al., 2014) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images. However, they are notoriously hard to train and can suffer from the problem of missing modes where the model is not able to produce examples in certain regions of the space. We propose an iterative procedure, called AdaGAN, where at every step we add a new component into a mixture model by running a GAN algorithm on a reweighted sample. This is inspired by boosting algorithms, where many potentially weak individual predictors are greedily aggregated to form a strong composite predictor. We prove that such an incremental procedure leads to convergence to the true distribution in a finite number of steps if each step is optimal, and convergence at an exponential rate otherwise. We also illustrate experimentally that this procedure addresses the problem of missing modes.