IVE-GAN: Invariant Encoding Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful framework for generative tasks. However, they are difficult to train and tend to miss modes of the true data generation process. Although GANs can learn a rich representation of the covered modes of the data in their latent space, the framework misses an inverse mapping from data to this latent space. We propose Invariant Encoding Generative Adversarial Networks (IVE-GANs), a novel GAN framework that introduces such a mapping for individual samples from the data by utilizing features in the data which are invariant to certain transformations. Since the model maps individual samples to the latent space, it naturally encourages the generator to cover all modes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of generative performance and learning rich representations on several datasets including common benchmark image generation tasks.