CLR-GAN: Improving GANs Stability and Quality via Consistent Latent Representation and Reconstruction

Abstract

Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) have received considerable attention due to its outstanding ability to generate images. However, training a GAN is hard since the game between the Generator(G) and the Discriminator(D) is unfair. Towards making the competition fairer, we propose a new perspective of training GANs, named Consistent Latent Representation and Reconstruction(CLR-GAN). In this paradigm, we treat the G and D as an inverse process, the discriminator has an additional task to restore the pre-defined latent code while the generator also needs to reconstruct the real input, thus obtaining a relationship between the latent space of G and the out-features of D. Based on this prior, we can put D and G on an equal position during training using a new criterion. Experimental results on various datasets and architectures prove our paradigm can make GANs more stable and generate better quality images(31.22% gain of FID on CIFAR10 and 39.5% on AFHQ-Cat, respectively). We hope that the proposed perspective can inspire researchers to explore different ways of viewing GANs training, rather than being limited to a two-player game. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Petecheco/CLR-GAN.