Consistency-GAN: Training GANs with Consistency Model

For generative learning tasks, there are three crucial criteria for generating samples from the models: quality, coverage/diversity, and sampling speed. Among the existing generative models, Generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models demonstrate outstanding quality performance while suffering from notable limitations. GANs can generate high-quality results and enable fast sampling, their drawbacks, however, lie in the limited diversity of the generated samples. On the other hand, diffusion models excel at generating high-quality results with a commendable diversity. Yet, its iterative generation process necessitates hundreds to thousands of sampling steps, leading to slow speeds that are impractical for real-time scenarios. To address the aforementioned problem, this paper proposes a novel Consistency-GAN model. In particular, to aid in the training of the GAN, we introduce instance noise, which employs consistency models using only a few steps compared to the conventional diffusion process. Our evaluations on various datasets indicate that our approach significantly accelerates sampling speeds compared to traditional diffusion models, while preserving sample quality and diversity. Furthermore, our approach also has better model coverage than traditional adversarial training methods.