GANPyTorch
Genereative Adversarial Networks
The main goal of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is to generate images that are similar (but not identical) to training dataset.
GAN consists of two neural networks that are trained against each other:
- Generator takes a random vector, and should generate an image from it
- Discriminator is a networks that should distinguish between original image (from training dataset), and the one generated by the generator.

Generator
The role of a generator is to take a random vector of some size (it is similar to latent vector in autoencoders) and generate the target image. It is very similar to the generative side of autoencoder.
In our example, we will use linear neural networks and MNIST dataset.
A few tricks used in generator:
- Instead of ReLU, we use LeakyReLU, i.e. a ReLU which is not exactly 0 for negative , but rather another linear function with very small slope.
- We use BatchNorm1D in order to stabilize training
- The activation function on last layer is Tanh, so the output is in the range [-1,1].
Discriminator
Discriminator is a classical image classification network. In our first example, we will also use linear classifier.
Loading dataset
We will use MNIST dataset.
Network training
On each step of the training, we have two phases:
-
Generator training. We generate some random vectors noise (training happens in minibatches, so we use 100 vectors at a time), generate true labels (vector with shape (bs, 1) with 1.0 values), calculate generator loss between output from frozen discriminator with noise as input and true labels.
-
Discriminator training. We calculate discriminator loss from two parts, first part is loss between output from discriminator with noise as input and fake labels (vector with shape (bs, 1) with 0.0 values), second part is loss between output from discriminator with real images as input and true labels (vector with shape (bs, 1) with 1.0 values). Result loss is (first_part_loss + second_part_loss) / 2.
0%| | 0/100 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
10%|█ | 10/100 [01:32<13:49, 9.21s/it, generator loss:=1.04, discriminator loss:=0.547]
20%|██ | 20/100 [03:05<12:18, 9.23s/it, generator loss:=0.935, discriminator loss:=0.596]
30%|███ | 30/100 [04:38<10:47, 9.24s/it, generator loss:=0.9, discriminator loss:=0.617]
40%|████ | 40/100 [06:11<09:16, 9.28s/it, generator loss:=0.851, discriminator loss:=0.634]
50%|█████ | 50/100 [07:45<07:49, 9.38s/it, generator loss:=0.839, discriminator loss:=0.638]
60%|██████ | 60/100 [09:19<06:21, 9.54s/it, generator loss:=0.836, discriminator loss:=0.637]
70%|███████ | 70/100 [10:52<04:38, 9.27s/it, generator loss:=0.844, discriminator loss:=0.636]
80%|████████ | 80/100 [12:27<03:05, 9.30s/it, generator loss:=0.853, discriminator loss:=0.634]
90%|█████████ | 90/100 [13:59<01:31, 9.19s/it, generator loss:=0.854, discriminator loss:=0.633]
99%|█████████▉| 99/100 [15:23<00:09, 9.29s/it, generator loss:=0.866, discriminator loss:=0.629]
100%|██████████| 100/100 [15:32<00:00, 9.33s/it, generator loss:=0.865, discriminator loss:=0.629]
DCGAN
Deep Convolutional GAN is pretty obvious idea of using convolutional layers for generator and discriminator. The main difference here is using Conv2DTranspose layer in the generator.
Image from this tutorial
Weights initialization from DCGAN paper.
0%| | 0/50 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
10%|█ | 5/50 [00:53<08:03, 10.74s/it, generator loss:=2.38, discriminator loss:=0.256]
20%|██ | 10/50 [01:47<07:03, 10.58s/it, generator loss:=2.12, discriminator loss:=0.254]
30%|███ | 15/50 [02:40<06:12, 10.66s/it, generator loss:=2.2, discriminator loss:=0.255]
40%|████ | 20/50 [03:33<05:17, 10.57s/it, generator loss:=2.21, discriminator loss:=0.266]
50%|█████ | 25/50 [04:27<04:24, 10.60s/it, generator loss:=2.34, discriminator loss:=0.229]
60%|██████ | 30/50 [05:20<03:32, 10.65s/it, generator loss:=2.42, discriminator loss:=0.225]
70%|███████ | 35/50 [06:13<02:39, 10.60s/it, generator loss:=2.55, discriminator loss:=0.216]
80%|████████ | 40/50 [07:07<01:46, 10.62s/it, generator loss:=2.62, discriminator loss:=0.207]
90%|█████████ | 45/50 [08:00<00:52, 10.55s/it, generator loss:=2.8, discriminator loss:=0.178]
98%|█████████▊| 49/50 [08:43<00:10, 10.65s/it, generator loss:=2.77, discriminator loss:=0.2]
100%|██████████| 50/50 [08:54<00:00, 10.68s/it, generator loss:=2.79, discriminator loss:=0.184]
Task: Try generating more complex color images with DCGAN - for example, take one class from CIFAR-10 dataset.
Training on Paintings
One of the good candidates for GAN training are paintings created by human artists.

(Photo from Art of Artificial collection)