Self-supervised (SS) learning is a powerful approach for representation learning using unlabeled data. Recently, it has been applied to Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) training. Specifically, SS tasks were proposed to address the catastrophic forgetting issue in the GAN discriminator. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis to understand how SS tasks interact with learning of generator. From the analysis, we identify issues of SS tasks which allow a severely mode-collapsed generator to excel the SS tasks.

Spectral normalization (SN) is a widely-used technique for improving the stability and sample quality of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, current understanding of SN's efficacy is limited. In this work, we show that SN controls two important failure modes of GAN training: exploding and vanishing gradients. Our proofs illustrate a (perhaps unintentional) connection with the successful LeCun initialization. This connection helps to explain why the most popular implementation of SN for GANs requires no hyper-parameter tuning, whereas stricter implementations of SN have poor empirical performance out-of-the-box. Unlike LeCun initialization which only controls gradient vanishing at the beginning of training, SN preserves this property throughout training. Building on this theoretical understanding, we propose a new spectral normalization technique: Bidirectional Scaled Spectral Normalization (BSSN), which incorporates insights from later improvements to LeCun initialization: Xavier initialization and Kaiming initialization. Theoretically, we show that BSSN gives better gradient control than SN. Empirically, we demonstrate that it outperforms SN in sample quality and training stability on several benchmark datasets.

Originality: The method is relatively new although it is similar to some conditional GAN works in the literature. The main idea is the analysis showing the limitations of prior GAN+SSL work and in proposing a scheme with better chances of succeeding (at least theoretically). Then experiments show that there is an improvement. It would be good to show more the analogies to prior conditional GAN work, and this would not hurt the contribution, rather it would better clarify its context and provide more links to practitioners (who could better understand it). Basically, the minimax game should use the same cost function for the optimization of the discriminator, the generator and the classifier.

NeurIPS 2019 Sun Dec 8th through Sat the 14th, 2019 at Vancouver Convention Center "7259" "Self-supervised GAN: Analysis and Improvement with Multi-class Minimax Game" The paper addresses a problem in self supervised GAN, where the classes strictly have disjoint support. This is mitigated by introducing a new class for generated samples.

Self-supervised (SS) learning is a powerful approach for representation learning using unlabeled data. Recently, it has been applied to Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) training. Specifically, SS tasks were proposed to address the catastrophic forgetting issue in the GAN discriminator. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis to understand how SS tasks interact with learning of generator. From the analysis, we identify issues of SS tasks which allow a severely mode-collapsed generator to excel the SS tasks.

Spectral normalization (SN) is a widely-used technique for improving the stability and sample quality of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, current understanding of SN's efficacy is limited. In this work, we show that SN controls two important failure modes of GAN training: exploding and vanishing gradients. Our proofs illustrate a (perhaps unintentional) connection with the successful LeCun initialization. This connection helps to explain why the most popular implementation of SN for GANs requires no hyper-parameter tuning, whereas stricter implementations of SN have poor empirical performance out-of-the-box.

Policy gradient is a useful model-free reinforcement learning approach, but it tends to suffer from instability of gradient estimates. In this paper, we analyze and improve the stability of policy gradient methods. We first prove that the variance of gradient estimates in the PGPE(policy gradients with parameter-based exploration) method is smaller than that of the classical REINFORCE method under a mild assumption. We then derive the optimal baseline for PGPE, which contributes to further reducing the variance. We also theoretically show that PGPE with the optimal baseline is more preferable than REINFORCE with the optimal baseline in terms of the variance of gradient estimates.

Figure 1: Training instability is one of the biggest challenges in training GANs. Despite the existence of successful heuristics like Spectral Normalization (SN) for improving stability, it is poorly-understood why they work. In our research, we theoretically explain why SN stabilizes GAN training. Using these insights, we further propose a better normalization technique for improving GANs' stability called Bidirectional Scaled Spectral Normalization. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a class of popular generative models enabling many cutting-edge applications such as photorealistic image synthesis.

Figure 1: Training instability is one of the biggest challenges in training GANs. Despite the existence of successful heuristics like Spectral Normalization (SN) for improving stability, it is poorly-understood why they work. In our research, we theoretically explain why SN stabilizes GAN training. Using these insights, we further propose a better normalization technique for improving GANs' stability called Bidirectional Scaled Spectral Normalization. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a class of popular generative models enabling many cutting-edge applications such as photorealistic image synthesis.

Self-supervised (SS) learning is a powerful approach for representation learning using unlabeled data. Recently, it has been applied to Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) training. Specifically, SS tasks were proposed to address the catastrophic forgetting issue in the GAN discriminator. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis to understand how SS tasks interact with learning of generator. From the analysis, we identify issues of SS tasks which allow a severely mode-collapsed generator to excel the SS tasks.