No Arabic abstract
The compression of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has lately drawn attention, due to the increasing demand for deploying GANs into mobile devices for numerous applications such as image translation, enhancement and editing. However, compared to the substantial efforts to compressing other deep models, the research on compressing GANs (usually the generators) remains at its infancy stage. Existing GAN compression algorithms are limited to handling specific GAN architectures and losses. Inspired by the recent success of AutoML in deep compression, we introduce AutoML to GAN compression and develop an AutoGAN-Distiller (AGD) framework. Starting with a specifically designed efficient search space, AGD performs an end-to-end discovery for new efficient generators, given the target computational resource constraints. The search is guided by the original GAN model via knowledge distillation, therefore fulfilling the compression. AGD is fully automatic, standalone (i.e., needing no trained discriminators), and generically applicable to various GAN models. We evaluate AGD in two representative GAN tasks: image translation and super resolution. Without bells and whistles, AGD yields remarkably lightweight yet more competitive compressed models, that largely outperform existing alternatives. Our codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/TAMU-VITA/AGD.
Neural architecture search (NAS) has witnessed prevailing success in image classification and (very recently) segmentation tasks. In this paper, we present the first preliminary study on introducing the NAS algorithm to generative adversarial networks (GANs), dubbed AutoGAN. The marriage of NAS and GANs faces its unique challenges. We define the search space for the generator architectural variations and use an RNN controller to guide the search, with parameter sharing and dynamic-resetting to accelerate the process. Inception score is adopted as the reward, and a multi-level search strategy is introduced to perform NAS in a progressive way. Experiments validate the effectiveness of AutoGAN on the task of unconditional image generation. Specifically, our discovered architectures achieve highly competitive performance compared to current state-of-the-art hand-crafted GANs, e.g., setting new state-of-the-art FID scores of 12.42 on CIFAR-10, and 31.01 on STL-10, respectively. We also conclude with a discussion of the current limitations and future potential of AutoGAN. The code is available at https://github.com/TAMU-VITA/AutoGAN
Recent improvements in generative adversarial visual synthesis incorporate real and fake image transformation in a self-supervised setting, leading to increased stability and perceptual fidelity. However, these approaches typically involve image augmentations via additional regularizers in the GAN objective and thus spend valuable network capacity towards approximating transformation equivariance instead of their desired task. In this work, we explicitly incorporate inductive symmetry priors into the network architectures via group-equivariant convolutional networks. Group-convolutions have higher expressive power with fewer samples and lead to better gradient feedback between generator and discriminator. We show that group-equivariance integrates seamlessly with recent techniques for GAN training across regularizers, architectures, and loss functions. We demonstrate the utility of our methods for conditional synthesis by improving generation in the limited data regime across symmetric imaging datasets and even find benefits for natural images with preferred orientation.
Recent work introduced progressive network growing as a promising way to ease the training for large GANs, but the model design and architecture-growing strategy still remain under-explored and needs manual design for different image data. In this paper, we propose a method to dynamically grow a GAN during training, optimizing the network architecture and its parameters together with automation. The method embeds architecture search techniques as an interleaving step with gradient-based training to periodically seek the optimal architecture-growing strategy for the generator and discriminator. It enjoys the benefits of both eased training because of progressive growing and improved performance because of broader architecture design space. Experimental results demonstrate new state-of-the-art of image generation. Observations in the search procedure also provide constructive insights into the GAN model design such as generator-discriminator balance and convolutional layer choices.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated unprecedented success in various image generation tasks. The encouraging results, however, come at the price of a cumbersome training process, during which the generator and discriminator are alternately updated in two stages. In this paper, we investigate a general training scheme that enables training GANs efficiently in only one stage. Based on the adversarial losses of the generator and discriminator, we categorize GANs into two classes, Symmetric GANs and Asymmetric GANs, and introduce a novel gradient decomposition method to unify the two, allowing us to train both classes in one stage and hence alleviate the training effort. We also computationally analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, and empirically demonstrate that, the proposed method yields a solid $1.5times$ acceleration across various datasets and network architectures. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method is readily applicable to other adversarial-training scenarios, such as data-free knowledge distillation. The code is available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/OSGAN.
Current GAN-based art generation methods produce unoriginal artwork due to their dependence on conditional input. Here, we propose Sketch-And-Paint GAN (SAPGAN), the first model which generates Chinese landscape paintings from end to end, without conditional input. SAPGAN is composed of two GANs: SketchGAN for generation of edge maps, and PaintGAN for subsequent edge-to-painting translation. Our model is trained on a new dataset of traditional Chinese landscape paintings never before used for generative research. A 242-person Visual Turing Test study reveals that SAPGAN paintings are mistaken as human artwork with 55% frequency, significantly outperforming paintings from baseline GANs. Our work lays a groundwork for truly machine-original art generation.