Papers › Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study

Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study

28 Nov 2017NeurIPS 2018 12arXiv:1711.10337archive 2025-07-28

Mario Lucic, Karol Kurach, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bousquet

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are a powerful subclass of generative models. Despite a very rich research activity leading to numerous interesting GAN algorithms, it is still very hard to assess which algorithm(s) perform better than others. We conduct a neutral, multi-faceted large-scale empirical study on state-of-the art models and evaluation measures. We find that most models can reach similar scores with enough hyperparameter optimization and random restarts. This suggests that improvements can arise from a higher computational budget and tuning more than fundamental algorithmic changes. To overcome some limitations of the current metrics, we also propose several data sets on which precision and recall can be computed. Our experimental results suggest that future GAN research should be based on more systematic and objective evaluation procedures. Finally, we did not find evidence that any of the tested algorithms consistently outperforms the non-saturating GAN introduced in \cite{goodfellow2014generative}.

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Hyperparameter Optimization

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Convolution

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