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論文閱讀筆記(四十六):Generative Adversarial Nets

Abstract
We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game.

In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1/2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined 2 by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples.
Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.

Introduction
The promise of deep learning is to discover rich, hierarchical models [2] that represent probability distributions over the kinds of data encountered in artificial intelligence applications, such as natural images, audio waveforms containing speech, and symbols in natural language corpora. So far, the most striking successes in deep learning have involved discriminative models, usually those that map a high-dimensional, rich sensory input to a class label [14, 22]. These striking successes have primarily been based on the backpropagation and dropout algorithms, using piecewise linear units [19, 9, 10] which have a particularly well-behaved gradient . Deep generative models have had less of an impact, due to the difficulty of approximating many intractable probabilistic computations that arise in maximum likelihood estimation and related strategies, and due to difficulty of leveraging the benefits of piecewise linear units in the generative context.

We propose a new generative model estimation procedure that sidesteps these difficulties. 1

In the proposed adversarial nets framework, the generative model is pitted against an adversary: a discriminative model that learns to determine whether a sample is from the model distribution or the data distribution. The generative model can be thought of as analogous to a team of counterfeiters, trying to produce fake currency and use it without detection, while the discriminative model is analogous to the police, trying to detect the counterfeit currency. Competition in this game drives both teams to improve their methods until the counterfeits are indistiguishable from the genuine articles.

This framework can yield specific training algorithms for many kinds of model and optimization algorithm. In this article, we explore the special case when the generative model generates samples by passing random noise through a multilayer perceptron, and the discriminative model is also a multilayer perceptron. We refer to this special case as adversarial nets. In this case, we can train both models using only the highly successful backpropagation and dropout algorithms [17] and sample from the generative model using only forward propagation. No approximate inference or Markov chains are necessary.

Related work
An alternative to directed graphical models with latent variables are undirected graphical models with latent variables, such as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) [27, 16], deep Boltzmann machines (DBMs) [26] and their numerous variants. The interactions within such models are represented as the product of unnormalized potential functions, normalized by a global summation/integration over all states of the random variables. This quantity (the partition function) and its gradient are intractable for all but the most trivial instances, although they can be estimated by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Mixing poses a significant problem for learning algorithms that rely on MCMC [3, 5].

Deep belief networks (DBNs) [16] are hybrid models containing a single undirected layer and several directed layers. While a fast approximate layer-wise training criterion exists, DBNs incur the computational difficulties associated with both undirected and directed models.
Alternative criteria that do not approximate or bound the log-likelihood have also been proposed, such as score matching [18] and noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) [13]. Both of these require the learned probability density to be analytically specified up to a normalization constant. Note that in many interesting generative models with several layers of latent variables (such as DBNs and DBMs), it is not even possible to derive a tractable unnormalized probability density. Some models such as denoising auto-encoders [30] and contractive autoencoders have learning rules very similar to score matching applied to RBMs. In NCE, as in this work, a discriminative training criterion is employed to fit a generative model. However, rather than fitting a separate discriminative model, the generative model itself is used to discriminate generated data from samples a fixed noise distribution. Because NCE uses a fixed noise distribution, learning slows dramatically after the model has learned even an approximately correct distribution over a small subset of the observed variables.

Finally, some techniques do not involve defining a probability distribution explicitly, but rather train a generative machine to draw samples from the desired distribution. This approach has the advantage that such machines can be designed to be trained by back-propagation. Prominent recent work in this area includes the generative stochastic network (GSN) framework [5], which extends generalized denoising auto-encoders [4]: both can be seen as defining a parameterized Markov chain, i.e., one learns the parameters of a machine that performs one step of a generative Markov chain. Compared to GSNs, the adversarial nets framework does not require a Markov chain for sampling. Because adversarial nets do not require feedback loops during generation, they are better able to leverage piecewise linear units [19, 9, 10], which improve the performance of backpropagation but have problems with unbounded activation when used ina feedback loop. More recent examples of training a generative machine by back-propagating into it include recent work on auto-encoding variational Bayes [20] and stochastic backpropagation [24].

Adversarial nets
The adversarial modeling framework is most straightforward to apply when the models are both multilayer perceptrons. To learn the generator’s distribution pg over data x, we define a prior on input noise variables pz(z), then represent a mapping to data space as G(z;θg), where G is a differentiable function represented by a multilayer perceptron with parameters θg . We also define a second multilayer perceptron D(x; θd) that outputs a single scalar. D(x) represents the probability that x came from the data rather than pg. We train D to maximize the probability of assigning the correct label to both training examples and samples from G. We simultaneously train G to minimize log(1 − D(G(z))):

In other words, D and G play the following two-player minimax game with value function V (G, D):
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In the next section, we present a theoretical analysis of adversarial nets, essentially showing that the training criterion allows one to recover the data generating distribution as G and D are given enough capacity, i.e., in the non-parametric limit. See Figure 1 for a less formal, more pedagogical explanation of the approach. In practice, we must implement the game using an iterative, numerical approach. Optimizing D to completion in the inner loop of training is computationally prohibitive, and on finite datasets would result in overfitting. Instead, we alternate between k steps of optimizing D and one step of optimizing G. This results in D being maintained near its optimal solution, so long as G changes slowly enough. This strategy is analogous to the way that SML/PCD [31, 29] training maintains samples from a Markov chain from one learning step to the next in order to avoid burning in a Markov chain as part of the inner loop of learning. The procedure is formally presented in Algorithm 1.
In practice, equation 1 may not provide sufficient gradient for G to learn well. Early in learning, when G is poor, D can reject samples with high confidence because they are clearly different from the training data. In this case, log(1 − D(G(z))) saturates. Rather than training G to minimize log(1 − D(G(z))) we can train G to maximize log D(G(z)). This objective function results in the same fixed point of the dynamics of G and D but provides much stronger gradients early in learning.

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Figure 1: Generative adversarial nets are trained by simultaneously updating the discriminative distribution (D, blue, dashed line) so that it discriminates between samples from the data generating distribution (black, dotted line) px from those of the generative distribution pg (G) (green, solid line). The lower horizontal line is the domain from which z is sampled, in this case uniformly. The horizontal line above is part of the domain of x. The upward arrows show how the mapping x = G(z) imposes the non-uniform distribution pg on transformed samples. G contracts in regions of high density and expands in regions of low density of pg . (a) Consider an adversarial pair near convergence: pg is similar to pdata and D is a partially accurate classifier. (b) In the inner loop of the algorithm D is trained to discriminate samples from data, converging to D∗(x) =pdata(x) . (c) After an update to G, gradient of D has guided G(z) to flow to regions that are more likely pdata (x)+pg (x)to be classified as data. (d) After several steps of training, if G and D have enough capacity, they will reach a point at which both cannot improve because pg = pdata. The discriminator is unable to differentiate between the two distributions, i.e. D(x) = 1 .

4 Theoretical Results
The generator G implicitly defines a probability distribution pg as the distribution of the samples G(z) obtained when z ∼ pz. Therefore, we would like Algorithm 1 to converge to a good estimator of pdata, if given enough capacity and training time. The results of this section are done in a nonparametric setting, e.g. we represent a model with infinite capacity by studying convergence in the space of probability density functions.
We will show in section 4.1 that this minimax game has a global optimum for pg = pdata. We will then show in section 4.2 that Algorithm 1 optimizes Eq 1, thus obtaining the desired result.

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Advantages and disadvantages
This new framework comes with advantages and disadvantages relative to previous modeling frameworks. The disadvantages are primarily that there is no explicit representation of pg (x), and that D must be synchronized well with G during training (in particular, G must not be trained too much without updating D, in order to avoid “the Helvetica scenario” in which G collapses too many values of z to the same value of x to have enough diversity to model pdata), much as the negative chains of a Boltzmann machine must be kept up to date between learning steps. The advantages are that Markov chains are never needed, only backprop is used to obtain gradients, no inference is needed during learning, and a wide variety of functions can be incorporated into the model. Table 2 summarizes the comparison of generative adversarial nets with other generative modeling approaches.

The aforementioned advantages are primarily computational. Adversarial models may also gain some statistical advantage from the generator network not being updated directly with data examples, but only with gradients flowing through the discriminator. This means that components of the input are not copied directly into the generator’s parameters. Another advantage of adversarial networks is that they can represent very sharp, even degenerate distributions, while methods based on Markov chains require that the distribution be somewhat blurry in order for the chains to be able to mix between modes.

Conclusions and future work
This framework admits many straightforward extensions:

  1. A conditional generative model p(x | c) can be obtained by adding c as input to both G and D.
  2. Learned approximate inference can be performed by training an auxiliary network to predict z given x. This is similar to the inference net trained by the wake-sleep algorithm [15] but with the advantage that the inference net may be trained for a fixed generator net after the generator
    net has finished training.
  3. One can approximately model all conditionals p(xS | x̸S) where S is a subset of the indices of x by training a family of conditional models that share parameters. Essentially, one can use adversarial nets to implement a stochastic extension of the deterministic MP-DBM [11].
  4. Semi-supervised learning: features from the discriminator or inference net could improve performance of classifiers when limited labeled data is available.
  5. Efficiency improvements: training could be accelerated greatly by divising better methods for coordinating G and D or determining better distributions to sample z from during training.

This paper has demonstrated the viability of the adversarial modeling framework, suggesting that these research directions could prove useful.

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The most important one, in my opinion, is adversarial training (also called GAN for Generative Adversarial Networks). This is an idea that was originally proposed by Ian Goodfellow when he was a student with Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal (he since moved to Google Brain and recently to OpenAI).

This, and the variations that are now being proposed is the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML, in my opinion.

The idea is to simultaneously train two neural nets. The first one, called the Discriminator — let’s denote it D(Y) — takes an input (e.g. an image) and outputs a scalar that indicates whether the image Y looks “natural” or not. In one instance of adversarial training, D(Y) can be seem as some sort of energy function that takes a low value (e.g. close to 0) when Y is a real sample (e.g. an image from a database) and a positive value when it is not (e.g. if it’s a noisy or strange looking image). The second network is called the generator, denoted G(Z), where Z is generally a vector randomly sampled in a simple distribution (e.g. Gaussian). The role of the generator is to produce images so as to train the D(Y) function to take the right shape (low values for real images, higher values for everything else). During training D is shown a real image, and adjusts its parameter to make its output lower. Then D is shown an image produced from G and adjusts its parameters to make its output D(G(Z)) larger (following the gradient of some objective predefined function). But G(Z) will train itself to produce images so as to fool D into thinking they are real. It does this by getting the gradient of D with respect to Y for each sample it produces. In other words, it’s trying to minimize the output of D while D is trying to maximize it. Hence the name adversarial training.

The original formulation uses a considerably more complicated probabilistic framework, but that’s the gist of it.

Why is that so interesting? It allows us to train a discriminator as an unsupervised “density estimator”, i.e. a contrast function that gives us a low value for data and higher output for everything else. This discriminator has to develop a good internal representation of the data to solve this problem properly. It can then be used as a feature extractor for a classifier, for example.

But perhaps more interestingly, the generator can be seen as parameterizing the complicated surface of real data: give it a vector Z, and it maps it to a point on the data manifold. There are papers where people do amazing things with this, like generating pictures of bedrooms, doing arithmetic on faces in the Z vector space: [man with glasses] - [man without glasses] + [woman without glasses] = [woman with glasses].

There has been a series of interesting papers from FAIR on the topic:

Denton et al. “Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks” (NIPS 2015) : https://scholar.google.com/citat
Radford et al. “Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks” (ICLR 2015): https://scholar.google.com/citat
Mathieu et al. “Deep multi-scale video prediction beyond mean square error” : https://scholar.google.com/citat

This last one is on video prediction with adversarial training. It solves a really important issue, which is that when you train a neural net (or any other model) to predict the future, and when there are several possible futures, a network trained the traditional way (e.g. with least square) will predict the average of all the possible futures. In the case of video, it will produce a blurry mess. Adversarial training lets the system produce whatever it wants, as long as it’s within the set that the discriminator likes. This solves the “blurriness” problem when predicting under. uncertainty.

It seems like a rather technical issue, but I really think it opens the door to an entire world of possibilities.