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Title: Generative model based on minimizing exact empirical Wasserstein distance

Paper content:
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a very powerful framework for generative modeling.
However, they are often hard to train, and learning of GANs often becomes unstable.
Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) is a promising framework to deal with the instability problem as it has a good convergence property.
One drawback of the WGAN is that it evaluates the Wasserstein distance in the dual domain, which requires some approximation, so that it may fail to optimize the true Wasserstein distance.
In this paper, we propose evaluating the exact empirical optimal transport cost efficiently in the primal domain and performing gradient descent with respect to its derivative to train the generator network.
Experiments on the MNIST dataset show that our method is significantly stable to converge, and achieves the lowest Wasserstein distance among the WGAN variants at the cost of some sharpness of generated images.
Experiments on the 8-Gaussian toy dataset show that better gradients for the generator are obtained in our method.
In addition, the proposed method enables more flexible generative modeling than WGAN.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) BID2 are a powerful framework of generative modeling which is formulated as a minimax game between two networks: A generator network generates fake-data from some noise source and a discriminator network discriminates between fake-data and real-data.
GANs can generate much more realistic images than other generative models like variational autoencoder BID10 or autoregressive models BID14 , and have been widely used in high-resolution image generation BID8 , image inpainting BID18 , image-to-image translation BID7 , to mention a few.
However, GANs are often hard to train, and various ways to stabilize training have been proposed by many recent works.
Nonetheless, consistently stable training of GANs remains an open problem.GANs employ the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence to measure the distance between the distributions of real-data and fake-data BID2 .
provided an analysis of various distances and divergence measures between two probability distributions in view of their use as loss functions of GANs, and proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) which has better theoretical properties than the original GANs.
WGAN requires that the discriminator (called the critic in ) must lie within the space of 1-Lipschitz functions to evaluate the Wasserstein distance via the Kantorovich-Rubinstein dual formulation.
further proposed implementing the critic with a deep neural network and applied weight clipping in order to ensure that the critic satisfies the Lipschitz condition.
However, weight clipping limits the critic's function space and can cause gradients in the critic to explode or vanish if the clipping parameters are not carefully chosen BID3 .
WGAN-GP BID3 and Spectral Normalization (SN) BID12 apply regularization and normalization, respectively, on the critic trying to make the critic 1-Lipschitz, but they fail to optimize the true Wasserstein distance.In the latest work, BID11 proposed a new WGAN variant to evaluate the exact empirical Wasserstein distance.
They evaluate the empirical Wasserstein distance between the empirical distributions of real-data and fake-data in the discrete case of the Kantorovich-Rubinstein dual for-mulation, which can be solved efficiently because the dual problem becomes a finite-dimensional linear-programming problem.
The generator network is trained using the critic network learnt to approximate the solution of the dual problem.
However, the problem of approximation error by the critic network remains.
In this paper, we propose a new generative model without the critic, which learns by directly evaluating gradient of the exact empirical optimal transport cost in the primal domain.
The proposed method corresponds to stochastic gradient descent of the optimal transport cost.
argued that JS divergences are potentially not continuous with respect to the generator's parameters, leading to GANs training difficulty.
They proposed instead using the Wasserstein-1 distance W 1 (q, p), which is defined as the minimum cost of transporting mass in order to transform the distribution q into the distribution p.
Under mild assumptions, W 1 (q, p) is continuous everywhere and differentiable almost everywhere.
We have proposed a new generative model that learns by directly minimizing exact empirical Wasserstein distance between the real-data distribution and the generator distribution.
Since the proposed method does not suffer from the constraints on the transport cost and the 1-Lipschitz constraint imposed on WGAN by solving the optimal transport problem in the primal domain instead of the dual domain, one can construct more flexible generative modeling.
The proposed method provides the generator with better gradient information to minimize the Wasserstein distance (Section 5.2) and achieved smaller empirical Wasserstein distance with lower computational cost (Section 5.1) than any other compared variants of WGAN.
In the future work, we would like to investigate the behavior of the proposed method when transport cost is defined in the feature space embedded by an appropriate inception model.

assistant: text: We have proposed a flexible generative model that learns stably by directly minimizing exact empirical Wasserstein distance.