RoCGAN: Robust Conditional GAN

Abstract

Conditional image generation lies at the heart of computer vision and conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) have recently become the method of choice for this task, owing to their superior performance. The focus so far has largely been on performance improvement, with little effort in making cGANs more robust to noise. However, the regression (of the generator) might lead to arbitrarily large errors in the output, which makes cGANs unreliable for real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a novel conditional GAN model, called RoCGAN, which leverages structure in the target space of the model to address the issue. Specifically, we augment the generator with an unsupervised pathway, which promotes the outputs of the generator to span the target manifold, even in the presence of intense noise. We prove that RoCGAN share similar theoretical properties as GAN and establish with both synthetic and real data the merits of our model. We perform a thorough experimental validation on large scale datasets for natural scenes and faces and observe that our model outperforms existing cGAN architectures by a large margin. We also empirically demonstrate the performance of our approach in the face of two types of noise (adversarial and Bernoulli).