Improving GAN Equilibrium by Raising Spatial Awareness

The success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is largely built upon the adversarial training between a generator (G) and a discriminator (D). They are expected to reach a certain equilibrium where D cannot distinguish the generated images from the real ones. However, such an equilibrium is rarely achieved in practical GAN training, instead, D almost always surpasses G. We attribute one of its sources to the information asymmetry between D and G. We observe that D learns its own visual attention when determining whether an image is real or fake, but G has no explicit clue on which regions to focus on for a particular synthesis. To alleviate the issue of D dominating the competition in GANs, we aim to raise the spatial awareness of G. Randomly sampled multi-level heatmaps are encoded into the intermediate layers of G as an inductive bias. Thus G can purposefully improve the synthesis of certain image regions. We further propose to align the spatial awareness of G with the attention map induced from D. Through this way we effectively lessen the information gap between D and G. Extensive results show that our method pushes the two-player game in GANs closer to the equilibrium, leading to a better synthesis performance. As a byproduct, the introduced spatial awareness facilitates interactive editing over the output synthesis. Demo video and code are available at https://genforce.github.io/eqgan-sa/ .