Generalization and equilibrium in generative adversarial nets (GANs) (invited talk)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become one of the dominant methods for fitting generative models to complicated real-life data, and even found unusual uses such as designing good cryptographic primitives. In this talk, we will first introduce the ba- sics of GANs and then discuss the fundamental statistical question about GANs — assuming the training can succeed with polynomial samples, can we have any statistical guarantees for the estimated distributions? In the work with Arora, Ge, Liang, and Zhang, we suggested a dilemma: powerful discriminators cause overfitting, whereas weak discriminators cannot detect mode collapse. Such a conundrum may be solved or alleviated by designing discrimina- tor class with strong distinguishing power against the particular generator class (instead of against all possible generators.)