A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in a game (in the sense of game theory, often but not always in the form of a zero-sum game). Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set. For example, a GAN trained on photographs can generate new photographs that look at least superficially authentic to human observers, having many realistic characteristics. Though originally proposed as a form of generative model for unsupervised learning, GANs have also proven useful for semi-supervised learning, fully supervised learning, and reinforcement learning.
The generative network generates candidates while the discriminative network evaluates them. The contest operates in terms of data distributions. Typically, the generative network learns to map from a latent space to a data distribution of interest, while the discriminative network distinguishes candidates produced by the generator from the true data distribution. The generative network's training objective is to increase the error rate of the discriminative network (i.e., "fool" the discriminator network by producing novel candidates that the discriminator thinks are not synthesized (are part of the true data distribution)).
A known dataset serves as the initial training data for the discriminator. Training it involves presenting it with samples from the training dataset, until it achieves acceptable accuracy. The generator trains based on whether it succeeds in fooling the discriminator. Typically the generator is seeded with randomized input that is sampled from a predefined latent space (e.g. a multivariate normal distribution). Thereafter, candidates synthesized by the generator are evaluated by the discriminator. Backpropagation is applied in both networks so that the generator produces better images, while the discriminator becomes more skilled at flagging synthetic images. The generator is typically a deconvolutional neural network, and the discriminator is a convolutional neural network.
GANs often suffer from a "mode collapse" where they fail to generalize properly, missing entire modes from the input data. For example, a GAN trained on the MNIST dataset containing many samples of each digit, might nevertheless timidly omit a subset of the digits from its output. Some researchers perceive the root problem to be a weak discriminative network that fails to notice the pattern of omission, while others assign blame to a bad choice of objective function. Many solutions have been proposed.
The most direct inspiration for GANs was noise-contrastive estimation, which uses the same loss function as GANs and which Goodfellow studied during his PhD in 2010–2014.
Other people had similar ideas but did not develop them similarly. An idea involving adversarial networks was published in a 2010 blog post by Olli Niemitalo. This idea was never implemented and did not involve stochasticity in the generator and thus was not a generative model. It is now known as a conditional GAN or cGAN. An idea similar to GANs was used to model animal behavior by Li, Gauci and Gross in 2013.
Adversarial machine learning has other uses besides generative modeling and can be applied to models other than neural networks. In control theory, adversarial learning based on neural networks was used in 2006 to train robust controllers in a game theoretic sense, by alternating the iterations between a minimizer policy, the controller, and a maximizer policy, the disturbance.
In 2017, a GAN was used for image enhancement focusing on realistic textures rather than pixel-accuracy, producing a higher image quality at high magnification. In 2017, the first faces were generated. These were exhibited in February 2018 at the Grand Palais. Faces generated by StyleGAN in 2019 drew comparisons with deepfakes.
Beginning in 2017, GAN technology began to make its presence felt in the fine arts arena with the appearance of a newly developed implementation which was said to have crossed the threshold of being able to generate unique and appealing abstract paintings, and thus dubbed a "CAN", for "creative adversarial network". A GAN system was used to create the 2018 painting Edmond de Belamy, which sold for US$432,500. An early 2019 article by members of the original CAN team discussed further progress with that system, and gave consideration as well to the overall prospects for an AI-enabled art.
In May 2019, researchers at Samsung demonstrated a GAN-based system that produces videos of a person speaking, given only a single photo of that person.
In August 2019, a large dataset consisting of 12,197 MIDI songs each with paired lyrics and melody alignment was created for neural melody generation from lyrics using conditional GAN-LSTM (refer to sources at GitHub AI Melody Generation from Lyrics).
In May 2020, Nvidia researchers taught an AI system (termed "GameGAN") to recreate the game of Pac-Man simply by watching it being played.