The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline
Authors: name: Yiwen Huang; name: Aaron Gokaslan; name: Volodymyr Kuleshov; name: James Tompkin
Published: 2025-01-09 18:53:06

Abstract: There is a widely-spread claim that GANs are difficult to train, and GAN
architectures in the literature are littered with empirical tricks. We provide
evidence against this claim and build a modern GAN baseline in a more
principled manner. First, we derive a well-behaved regularized relativistic GAN
loss that addresses issues of mode dropping and non-convergence that were
previously tackled via a bag of ad-hoc tricks. We analyze our loss
mathematically and prove that it admits local convergence guarantees, unlike
most existing relativistic losses. Second, our new loss allows us to discard
all ad-hoc tricks and replace outdated backbones used in common GANs with
modern architectures. Using StyleGAN2 as an example, we present a roadmap of
simplification and modernization that results in a new minimalist baseline --
R3GAN. Despite being simple, our approach surpasses StyleGAN2 on FFHQ,
ImageNet, CIFAR, and Stacked MNIST datasets, and compares favorably against
state-of-the-art GANs and diffusion models.