Lipizzaner: A System That Scales Robust Generative Adversarial Network Training

Abstract: GANs are difficult to train due to convergence pathologies such as mode and discriminator collapse. We introduce Lipizzaner, an open source software system that allows machine learning engineers to train GANs in a distributed and robust way. Lipizzaner distributes a competitive coevolutionary algorithm which, by virtue of dual, adapting, generator and discriminator populations, is robust to collapses. The algorithm is well suited to efficient distribution because it uses a spatial grid abstraction. Training is local to each cell and strong intermediate training results are exchanged among overlapping neighborhoods allowing high performing solutions to propagate and improve with more rounds of training. Experiments on common image datasets overcome critical collapses. Communication overhead scales linearly when increasing the number of compute instances and we observe that increasing scale leads to improved model performance.