Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track
Ziqi Pan, Li Niu, Liqing Zhang
Despite the significant progress that has been made in the training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the mode collapse problem remains a major challenge in training GANs, which refers to a lack of diversity in generative samples. In this paper, we propose a new type of generative diversity named uniform diversity, which relates to a newly proposed type of mode collapse named $u$-mode collapse where the generative samples distribute nonuniformly over the data manifold. From a geometric perspective, we show that the uniform diversity is closely related with the generator uniformity property, and the maximum uniform diversity is achieved if the generator is uniform. To learn a uniform generator, we propose UniGAN, a generative framework with a Normalizing Flow based generator and a simple yet sample efficient generator uniformity regularization, which can be easily adapted to any other generative framework. A new type of diversity metric named udiv is also proposed to estimate the uniform diversity given a set of generative samples in practice. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our UniGAN in learning a uniform generator and improving uniform diversity.