Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are a powerful subclass of generative models. Despite a very rich research activity leading to numerous interesting new GAN algorithms, it is still very hard to assess which algorithm(s) perform better than others. We conduct a neutral, multi-faceted large-scale empirical study encompassing the state-of-the art models and evaluation measures. We find that most models can reach similar scores with enough hyperparameter optimization and random restarts. This suggests that improvements can come from computational budget and tuning more than fundamental algorithmic changes. To overcome some limitations of the current metrics, we also propose several data sets on which precision and recall can be computed. Our experimental results suggest that future GAN research should be based on more systematic and objective evaluation procedures. Also, we did not find evidence that any of the tested algorithms consistently outperform the original one.