Papers › Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs

Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs

31 Mar 2017NeurIPS 2017 12arXiv:1704.00028archive 2025-07-28

Ishaan Gulrajani, Faruk Ahmed, Martin Arjovsky, Vincent Dumoulin, Aaron Courville

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="1704.00028")

Code

Syntology Ran 27 of 49 code samples harvested from 28 repositories linked to this paper; 22 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 6 ran · our draft was wrong; 2 ran · fixture could not drive it; 19 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: community (archive-listed): 49 samples from 28 repositories, 27 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

110 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

igul222/improved_wgan_training officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
Aggrathon/MtGan mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
AlexMGitHub/PokeGAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
AndreasWieg/PC-PGGAN mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
CIFASIS/splitting_gan mentioned on GitHubtf report
ChengBinJin/WGAN-GP-tensorflow mentioned on GitHubtf report
EmilienDupont/wgan-gp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
JiaYunSong/Gan-for-Gem-Generation mentioned on GitHubpaddle report
LEEPEIQIN/EDSR mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
LWChen20/RCAN mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
Michael-T-McCann/simple-WGAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
MiloszGrabski/WGAN-gp mentioned on GitHubtf report
MinkaiXu/SobolevWassersteinGAN mentioned on GitHubtf report
Mohanned-Elkholy/ResNet-GAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
SimoneDutto/EDSR mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
WuChenshen/MeRGAN mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
Yukino1010/WGAN-GP mentioned on GitHubtf report
adler-j/bwgan mentioned on GitHubtf report
aelnouby/Text-to-Image-Synthesis mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
akashpalrecha/deblurring-pipeline mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
akashpalrecha/superres-deformable mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
alectryonexamples/gan_tf2 mentioned on GitHubtf report
amurthy1/dagan_torch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
apisarek/gan_advances mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
arturml/pytorch-wgan-gp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
asierae/VoiceDCGAN mentioned on GitHubtf report
bhargavajs07/Packed_WGAN_GP_Example mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
bigmao8576/WGAN-GP-Tensorflow2 mentioned on GitHubtf report
catalyst-team/gan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
changwoolee/WGAN-GP-tensorflow mentioned on GitHubtf report
chanshing/sobolev_gan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
cryu854/SinGAN mentioned on GitHubtf report
cwolfbrandt/csk mentioned on GitHubtf report
dabsdamoon/Anime-Colorization-v0.2 mentioned on GitHubmxnet report
dagrate/gan_network mentioned on GitHub report
daheyinyin/wgan_gp mentioned on GitHubmindspore report
divyam25/Oh-My-GAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
donand/GAN_pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dylanell/conditional-wgan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dylanell/wasserstein-gan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
eriklindernoren/Keras-GAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
eriklindernoren/PyTorch-GAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
fangyiyu/gnpassgan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
franroldans/tfm-franroldan-wav2pix mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
goldhuang/SRGAN-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
henry32144/wgan-gp-tensorflow mentioned on GitHubtf report
itsuki8914/wgan-gp-TensorFlow mentioned on GitHubtf report
jackyjsy/ACWGAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
joshpc/StyledFontGAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
jss367/thiskangaroodoesnotexist mentioned on GitHubtf report
kangyeolk/pytorch-gan-collections mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
kynk94/TF2-Image-Generation mentioned on GitHubtf report
laowng/GISR mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
leejaeka/PixelGAN mentioned on GitHub report
leejaeka/incrementum mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
lonce/sonyGanFork mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
lvyufeng/MindSpore-GAN mentioned on GitHubmindsporeMIT report
markmaxt/VideoSR mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
marload/GANs-TensorFlow2 mentioned on GitHubtf report
marload/TensorFlow2-GANs mentioned on GitHubtf report
matjazmav/fri-2021-ibb-seminar mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
maxmax1992/WGAN_WGAN-GP mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mbarbetti/tf-gen-models mentioned on GitHubtf report
mcclow12/wgan-gp-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
michael13162/DoodleGAN mentioned on GitHub report
mitscha/dplc mentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report
nannau/DoWnGAN mentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report
nicobernasconi/specgan mentioned on GitHubtf report
polmonroig/faceGAN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
qnduan/wgan-scrna mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
raylyh/misgan-reimplementation mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
rkem1542/EDSR-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
sanghyun-son/EDSR-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
seanmullery/iWGAN mentioned on GitHub report
shahbuland/basic-gans mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
snow-mn/GAN-INT-CLS mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
spandan2/Wgan-GP_cats mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
t0nberryking/DCGAN256 mentioned on GitHub report
tSchlegl/f-AnoGAN mentioned on GitHubtf report
tensorpack/tensorpack mentioned on GitHubtf report
thstkdgus35/EDSR-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
unicredit/ganzo mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
wayne1123/mnist_wgan_gp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
yaxingwang/Transferring-GANs mentioned on GitHubtf report
zeleni9/pytorch-wgan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
zhusiling/EDSR mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

49 samples harvested; 27 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 22 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

6ran · our draft was wrong
2ran · fixture could not drive it
19ran
22unverified

Licence: 20 of the 49 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from 28 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

CNN dylanell/wasserstein-gan/model/wasserstein_gan.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · 0ec8f070b436bb82 · report
Critic dylanell/conditional-wgan/conditional_gan/modules.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · 0faeeae133c3fe8e · report
Discriminator shahbuland/basic-gans/GP-WGAN-pytorch.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic no licence file found · pointer only · 3baa46870ebaf2e7 · report
Discriminator zeleni9/pytorch-wgan/models/wgan_gradient_penalty.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic MIT (permissive) · 1574ea170dc9603e · report
Discriminator polmonroig/faceGAN/models/WGAN/WGAN.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4c30b6ec62e2cafa · report
GAN mbarbetti/tf-gen-models/tf_gen_models/algorithms/gan/WGAN_GP.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · ca66ddb9527ba712 · report
Generator polmonroig/faceGAN/models/WGAN/WGAN.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5d714c6e5dfd6843 · report
Registry unicredit/ganzo/src/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1211de6102f39af9 · report
RegistryError unicredit/ganzo/src/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 118386abde232ad1 · report
SpatialGradient SimoneDutto/EDSR/src/loss/WMSE.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 2b2279cf4c0b7a8a · report
TransposeCNN dylanell/wasserstein-gan/model/wasserstein_gan.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 7eb6570e1d44fd51 · report
WGAN polmonroig/faceGAN/models/WGAN/WGAN.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 880e09007bbd86e5 · report
WGANGPGradientPenalty lonce/sonyGanFork/pg_gan/gradient_losses.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 0b8b1f3450493cad · report
WGANGPLoss unicredit/ganzo/src/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 6dbc8747d0edf6a9 · report
WassersteinGANLossGPDiscriminator ChristophReich1996/Mode_Collapse/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 355747b27841a53b · report
WassersteinLossDiscriminator catalyst-team/gan/catalyst_gan/nn/criterion/wasserstein.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · de7b7d62cd6320f4 · report
_conv2d itsuki8914/wgan-gp-TensorFlow/model.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 688218e8a8429c4e · report
_get_sobel_kernel_3x3 SimoneDutto/EDSR/src/loss/WMSE.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · dbe8774da55540af · report
calculate_gradient_penalty joshpc/StyledFontGAN/models/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 86e942c662b837d6 · report
compute_gradient_penalty goldhuang/SRGAN-PyTorch/model.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 8ad87c2d347e436c · report
discriminator snow-mn/GAN-INT-CLS/models/wgan.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic GPL-3.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · be8c52d2d8f0b336 · report
gradient_penalty bigmao8576/WGAN-GP-Tensorflow2/WGAN_GP_mask.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it no licence file found · pointer only · 86a6bb90b9961d27 · report
gradient_penalty spandan2/Wgan-GP_cats/wgan-gp.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · e7dcf2e7ee3db27c · report
gradient_penalty LynnHo/DCGAN-LSGAN-WGAN-WGAN-GP-Tensorflow/tf2gan/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · db554be6d2613650 · report
mask_dis bigmao8576/WGAN-GP-Tensorflow2/WGAN_GP_mask.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 496ef1809697c415 · report
register unicredit/ganzo/src/loss.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 28c0e133abb7a340 · report
sample_noise MaximeVandegar/Papers-in-100-Lines-of-Code/Improved_Training_of_Wasserstein_GANs/wgan.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 1d4e891b5ef55d07 · report
Discriminator YuguangTong/improved_wgan_training/gan_toy.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 9e3664dc1f8d79a4 · report
GP_Loss shahbuland/basic-gans/GP-WGAN-pytorch.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 38d85a91590ced10 · report
GlobalNormClip tensorpack/tensorpack/tensorpack/tfutils/gradproc.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 50a07668fe9b3d3b · report
GradientProcessor tensorpack/tensorpack/tensorpack/tfutils/gradproc.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bbe44bc91a190f0e · report
Mode ydataai/ydata-synthetic/src/data_synthetic/synthesizers/loss.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · f71df416fb250739 · report
ReLULayer YuguangTong/improved_wgan_training/gan_toy.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 5ee58317d1dcf2be · report
WGAN changwoolee/WGAN-GP-tensorflow/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 65bfd6652f1fb02c · report
WGAN_GP zeleni9/pytorch-wgan/models/wgan_gradient_penalty.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · bb30b440df15c192 · report
WGAN_GP mbarbetti/tf-gen-models/tf_gen_models/algorithms/gan/WGAN_GP.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 856effeb4071ae21 · report
WGAN_GP_MODEL dabsdamoon/Anime-Colorization-v0.2/WGAN-GP/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 1c858a9e29fdfd8d · report
WassersteinGAN dylanell/wasserstein-gan/model/wasserstein_gan.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 4d3cbfe5a38c03da · report
WassersteinGANLossGPDiscriminator ChristophReich1996/Dirac-GAN/dirac_gan/loss.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 02d4f9b368ee5f51 · report
_conv_layer itsuki8914/wgan-gp-TensorFlow/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 01ccd87d89d80f58 · report
_conv_variable itsuki8914/wgan-gp-TensorFlow/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · d3cc657acec1530d · report
_fc_variable itsuki8914/wgan-gp-TensorFlow/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 4e7d156f3933749a · report
buildDiscriminator itsuki8914/wgan-gp-TensorFlow/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 4e63648612d1972d · report
compute_gradient_penalty eriklindernoren/PyTorch-GAN/implementations/wgan_gp/wgan_gp.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 90d0782f63f78a1d · report
gradient_penalty raylyh/misgan-reimplementation/src/conv_misgan.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · ca4a31233df66289 · report
gradient_penalty marload/GANs-TensorFlow2/WGAN-GP/WGAN-GP.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · a931b7024fe9731c · report
gradient_penalty ydataai/ydata-synthetic/src/data_synthetic/synthesizers/loss.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 317df542c2389065 · report
tile_images dylanell/wasserstein-gan/model/wasserstein_gan.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 47b7024248fb9c22 · report
train MaximeVandegar/Papers-in-100-Lines-of-Code/Improved_Training_of_Wasserstein_GANs/wgan.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 0fdb0bd2677b553b · report

Tasks

Conditional Image GenerationImage GenerationSynthetic Data Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Conditional Image Generation CIFAR-10 WGAN-GP Inception score 8.67 #18 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation CAT 256x256 WGAN-GP FID 155.46 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation CIFAR-10 WGAN-GP FID 29.3 #68 of 78 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: WGAN GP, WGAN-GP Loss

1x1 ConvolutionAdamAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConvolutionGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationLayer NormalizationMax PoolingRMSPropReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionWGAN GPWGAN-GP Loss

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections