Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks

TLDR

Generative adversarial networks have achieved great success, but standard GANs use a sigmoid cross‑entropy loss that can cause vanishing gradients. The authors propose Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks to address this vanishing‑gradient problem. LSGANs replace the discriminator’s sigmoid cross‑entropy loss with a least‑squares loss, thereby reducing vanishing gradients. LSGANs minimize Pearson X² divergence, produce higher‑quality images, and train more stably than regular GANs, as demonstrated on LSUN and CIFAR‑10.

Abstract

Unsupervised learning with generative adversarial networks (GANs) has proven hugely successful. Regular GANs hypothesize the discriminator as a classifier with the sigmoid cross entropy loss function. However, we found that this loss function may lead to the vanishing gradients problem during the learning process. To overcome such a problem, we propose in this paper the Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks (LSGANs) which adopt the least squares loss function for the discriminator. We show that minimizing the objective function of LSGAN yields minimizing the Pearson X2 divergence. There are two benefits of LSGANs over regular GANs. First, LSGANs are able to generate higher quality images than regular GANs. Second, LSGANs perform more stable during the learning process. We evaluate LSGANs on LSUN and CIFAR-10 datasets and the experimental results show that the images generated by LSGANs are of better quality than the ones generated by regular GANs. We also conduct two comparison experiments between LSGANs and regular GANs to illustrate the stability of LSGANs.