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anomin89Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
Goodfellow et al. (2014)
Prepared for Academic Purposes
Abstract & Background
In 2014, Ian Goodfellow and colleagues introduced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a
breakthrough concept in generative modeling. Instead of directly programming a model to learn a
distribution, GANs proposed an adversarial framework where two models, a generator and a
discriminator, compete against each other. This idea captured the imagination of the research
community, as it opened new doors for producing synthetic but highly realistic data.
Key Contributions
GANs are composed of two neural networks: (1) a generator that produces synthetic samples, and
(2) a discriminator that learns to distinguish between real and generated data. Over time, the
generator learns to produce samples that can 'fool' the discriminator. The framework has been
applied in various fields, from creating photorealistic images to advancing medical imaging and data
augmentation.
Critical Analysis
The GAN framework is elegant but not without issues. On the positive side, GANs are extremely
versatile and capable of generating remarkably convincing data. They have inspired many
extensions such as DCGAN, CycleGAN, and StyleGAN. However, training is notoriously unstable
due to issues like mode collapse, where the generator produces limited variations of outputs.
Additionally, the technology has raised ethical concerns, particularly around the generation of
deepfakes.
Personal Reflection
From my perspective as a learner, the beauty of GANs lies in their simplicity: two models playing a
game. This mirrors many real-world competitive systems and makes the concept both intuitive and
powerful. At the same time, the social implications of GAN-generated media highlight the
responsibility researchers carry when developing such powerful tools. In my opinion, the future of
GANs will involve balancing their creative potential with stronger safeguards against misuse.
References
[1] I. Goodfellow, J. Pouget-Abadie, M. Mirza, B. Xu, D. Warde-Farley, S. Ozair, A. Courville and Y.
Bengio, 'Generative Adversarial Nets,' Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
(NeurIPS), 2014.
[2] A. Radford, L. Metz and S. Chintala, 'Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep
Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks,' arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06434, 2016.
[3] T. Karras, T. Aila, S. Laine and J. Lehtinen, 'Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality,
Stability, and Variation,' International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2018.
