Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): Challenges, Solutions, and Future Directions

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is a novel class of deep generative models which has recently gained significant attention. GANs learns complex and high-dimensional distributions implicitly over images, audio, and data. However, there exists major challenges in training of GANs, i.e., mode collapse, non-convergence and instability, due to inappropriate design of network architecture, use of objective function and selection of optimization algorithm. Recently, to address these challenges, several solutions for better design and optimization of GANs have been investigated based on techniques of re-engineered network architectures, new objective functions and alternative optimization algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing survey that has particularly focused on broad and systematic developments of these solutions. In this study, we perform a comprehensive survey of the advancements in GANs design and optimization solutions proposed to handle GANs challenges. We first identify key research issues within each design and optimization technique and then propose a new taxonomy to structure solutions by key research issues. In accordance with the taxonomy, we provide a detailed discussion on different GANs variants proposed within each solution and their relationships. Finally, based on the insights gained, we present the promising research directions in this rapidly growing field.Comment: 42 pages, Figure 13, Table

Scenario Generation for Cooling, Heating, and Power Loads Using Generative Moment Matching Networks

Scenario generations of cooling, heating, and power loads are of great significance for the economic operation and stability analysis of integrated energy systems. In this paper, a novel deep generative network is proposed to model cooling, heating, and power load curves based on a generative moment matching networks (GMMN) where an auto-encoder transforms high-dimensional load curves into low-dimensional latent variables and the maximum mean discrepancy represents the similarity metrics between the generated samples and the real samples. After training the model, the new scenarios are generated by feeding Gaussian noises to the scenario generator of the GMMN. Unlike the explicit density models, the proposed GMMN does not need to artificially assume the probability distribution of the load curves, which leads to stronger universality. The simulation results show that the GMMN not only fits the probability distribution of multi-class load curves well, but also accurately captures the shape (e.g., large peaks, fast ramps, and fluctuation), frequency-domain characteristics, and temporal-spatial correlations of cooling, heating, and power loads. Furthermore, the energy consumption of generated samples closely resembles that of real samples.Comment: This paper has been accepted by CSEE Journal of Power and Energy System

Texture Mixer: A Network for Controllable Synthesis and Interpolation of Texture

This paper addresses the problem of interpolating visual textures. We formulate this problem by requiring (1) by-example controllability and (2) realistic and smooth interpolation among an arbitrary number of texture samples. To solve it we propose a neural network trained simultaneously on a reconstruction task and a generation task, which can project texture examples onto a latent space where they can be linearly interpolated and projected back onto the image domain, thus ensuring both intuitive control and realistic results. We show our method outperforms a number of baselines according to a comprehensive suite of metrics as well as a user study. We further show several applications based on our technique, which include texture brush, texture dissolve, and animal hybridization.Comment: Accepted to CVPR'1