Learning Fast Converging, Effective Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks with a Mirrored Auxiliary Classifier

Training conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been remaining as a challenging task, though standard GANs have developed substantially and gained huge successes in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional GAN architecture with a mirrored auxiliary classifier (MAC-GAN) in its discriminator for the purpose of label conditioning. Unlike existing works, our mirrored auxiliary classifier contains both a real and a fake node for each specific class to distinguish real samples from generated samples that are assigned into the same category by previous models. Comparing with previous auxiliary classifier-based conditional GANs, our MAC-GAN learns a fast converging model for high-quality image generation, taking benefits from its robust, newly designed auxiliary classifier. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets illustrate that our proposed model improves the quality of image synthesis compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, much better classification performance can be achieved with the mirrored auxiliary classifier, which can in turn promote the use of MAC-GAN in various transfer learning tasks.