Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks

Xun Huang, Yixuan Li, Omid Poursaeed, John Hopcroft, Serge Belongie

Published 2016-12-13Version 1

In this paper we aim to leverage the powerful bottom-up discriminative representations to guide a top-down generative model. We propose a novel generative model named Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (SGAN), which is trained to invert the hierarchical representations of a discriminative bottom-up deep network. Our model consists of a top-down stack of GANs, each trained to generate "plausible" lower-level representations, conditioned on higher-level representations. A representation discriminator is introduced at each feature hierarchy to encourage the representation manifold of the generator to align with that of the bottom-up discriminative network, providing intermediate supervision. In addition, we introduce a conditional loss that encourages the use of conditional information from the layer above, and a novel entropy loss that maximizes a variational lower bound on the conditional entropy of generator outputs. To the best of our knowledge, the entropy loss is the first attempt to tackle the conditional model collapse problem that is common in conditional GANs. We first train each GAN of the stack independently, and then we train the stack end-to-end. Unlike the original GAN that uses a single noise vector to represent all the variations, our SGAN decomposes variations into multiple levels and gradually resolves uncertainties in the top-down generative process. Experiments demonstrate that SGAN is able to generate diverse and high-quality images, as well as being more interpretable than a vanilla GAN.