Conditioning Trick for Training Stable GANs

Abstract: In this paper we propose a conditioning trick, called difference departure from normality, applied on the generator network in response to instability issues during GAN training. We force the generator to get closer to the departure from normality function of real samples computed in the spectral domain of Schur decomposition. This binding makes the generator amenable to truncation and does not limit exploring all the possible modes. We slightly modify the BigGAN architecture incorporating residual network for synthesizing 2D representations of audio signals which enables reconstructing high quality sounds with some preserved phase information. Additionally, the proposed conditional training scenario makes a trade-off between fidelity and variety for the generated spectrograms. The experimental results on UrbanSound8k and ESC-50 environmental sound datasets and the Mozilla common voice dataset have shown that the proposed GAN configuration with the conditioning trick remarkably outperforms baseline architectures, according to three objective metrics: inception score, Frechet inception distance, and signal-to-noise ratio.