07. - Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

The source is a series of lecture notes on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). It begins with an introduction to generative models, comparing and contrasting them with discriminative models, and then introduces the concept of adversarial training, explaining how GANs work. The notes then dive into the different architectures and training procedures for GANs, including maximum likelihood estimation, KL divergence, and the minimax game formulation. They explain why GANs are so powerful for generating realistic data and describe some common training problems and their solutions, such as mode collapse and non-convergence. Finally, the notes discuss several GAN extensions, including conditional GANs, InfoGANs, CycleGANs, and LAPGANs, demonstrating their various applications in areas like image-to-image translation, text-to-image synthesis, and face aging.