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What is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?

Hamed Mohamadi

October 1, 2022

Table of contents

What is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?

The story of the police and the counterfeiter

What is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?

In 2014, Ian J. Goodfellow and his co-authors introduced the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). GANs perform unsupervised learning tasks in machine learning. Two models, known as generators and discriminators, are used to discover and learn the patterns in the input data.

Figure1. Overview of GAN papers, published in 2014. Source

Main components of a GAN

There are two essential components in a GAN that work in tandem to improve the network:

Generator: Typically, the Generator starts its work by receiving Gaussian noise from the input. The next objective of the Generator is to generate images as close as possible to reality.

Discriminator: Tasked with distinguishing fake images from real images, the discriminator examines the images generated by the Generator and determines whether images look real enough. The discriminator achieves this by comparing the dataset images and the images generated by the Generator.

In Short, a GAN strives to create images that look as natural as possible, and these images can often deceive humans and even the computer that created them into thinking they are real images.

The figure below shows an example of GAN training on handwritten digits (mnist). At each stage, the shapes start from noise and change shape to ultimately form handwritten digits.

The story of the police and the counterfeiter

It is customary to use the story of the police and the counterfeiter to explain the GAN. The main character of this story is a police officer (the Discriminator) who searches for counterfeit money and a counterfeiter (the Generator) who makes fake money.

At first, the counterfeiter knows nothing about how money is supposed to look, so he will create terrible forgeries. The officer is equally terrible at recognizing fake money.

Herein, the officer is informed that a specific dollar bill is fake. Then, we show a real dollar bill and ask how it differs from the fake one. In order to distinguish the real one from the fake one, the officer looks for new details. The officer might notice, for example, that authentic money has a picture of a person while fake money does not. As a result, he can distinguish between real and fake money.

In the next step, we explain to the counterfeiter that his money images are being rejected as fake and that they need to be improved.

This cycle repeats thousands of times until both networks become experts in this back-and-forth game. As time passes, the Generator produces near-perfect counterfeits, and the Discriminator becomes a Master Detective looking for the slightest anomalies.

Types of a GAN

1- Vanilla adversarial generative networks

(the original network introduced by Ian Goodfellow) (The Vanilla GAN)

2- Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks

A convolutional neural network is used as both a generator and a discriminator. For example, The network Nvidia developed generates images that are used to distinguish between real and false face images.

3- Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

It is possible to generate a specific type of data using the network. Consider the dataset of numbers 0 to 9 (mnist), each of which can generate random images of numbers in the usual adversarial generator network. The difference is that in this type of network, we can define a condition by feeding input C, so that it produces only the result we are looking for.

Figure4. Difference between GAN and Conditional GAN.

Discussion

One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, Yann Lecun, called GAN the most interesting machine learning idea of the last ten years. Researchers have achieved great success with GANs in the last 8 years. The following are some high-quality fake images of faces generated using GAN.

Figure5. Fake images of faces generated using GAN. Source

In addition to generating images of faces, the GAN has countless other applications. Various GAN-generated images can be found online. Among them are animal images, paintings in the style of famous painters, caricatures, and so on. The following are some of the applications of the GAN.

High-resolution image synthesis
Text to image conversion
Video Generation
Face synthesis
Image inpainting
Image to Image (pix2pix)
Domain Transfer Network(DTN)
Texture synthesis
Face Aging
Image blending
Generating 3D objects
Creating Anime characters
Pose Guided Person Image Generation
PixelDTGAN
Super Resolution

Figure6. Some applications of GAN; a) Face Aging, b) Texture synthesis, c) Domain Transfer Network(DTN), d) cycle GAN.

References

1. Goodfellow, Ian, et al. “Generative adversarial networks.” Communications of the ACM 63.11 (2020): 139-144.

2. Mirza, Mehdi, and Simon Osindero. “Conditional generative adversarial nets.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.1784 (2014).

3. Creswell, Antonia, et al. “Generative adversarial networks: An overview.” IEEE signal processing magazine 35.1 (2018): 53-65.

4. Gui, Jie, et al. “A review on generative adversarial networks: Algorithms, theory, and applications.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2021).

5. Mao, Xudong, and Qing Li. Generative adversarial networks for image generation. Springer Singapore, 2021.

6. Razavi-Far, Roozbeh, Ariel Ruiz-Garcia, and Vasile Palade. “An Introduction to Generative Adversarial Learning: Architectures and Applications.” Generative Adversarial Learning: Architectures and Applications. Springer, Cham, 2022. 1-6.

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What is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?

What is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?

Main components of a GAN

The story of the police and the counterfeiter

Types of a GAN

Discussion

References

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