Escaping from Collapsing Modes in a Constrained Space

Chia-Che Chang, Chieh Hubert Lin, Che-Rung Lee, Da-Cheng Juan, Wei Wei, Hwann-Tzong Chen; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 204-219

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) often suffer from unpredictable mode-collapsing during training. We study the issue of mode collapse of Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Network (BEGAN), which is one of the state-of-the-art generative models. Despite its potential of generating high-quality images, we find that BEGAN tends to collapse at some modes after a period of training. We propose a new model, called BEGAN with a Constrained Space (BEGAN-CS), which includes a latent-space constraint in the loss function. We show that BEGAN-CS can significantly improve training stability and suppress mode collapse without either increasing the model complexity or degrading the image quality. Further, we visualize the distribution of latent vectors to elucidate the effect of latent-space constraint. The experimental results show that our method has additional advantages of being able to train on small datasets and to generate images similar to a given real image but with variations of designated attributes on-the-fly.