Your GAN is Secretly an Energy-based Model and You Should use Discriminator Driven Latent Sampling
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Abstract (arXiv)
We show that the sum of the implicit generator log-density log pg of a GAN with the logit score of the discriminator defines an energy function which yields the true data density when the generator is imperfect but the discriminator is optimal, thus making it possible to improve on the typical generator (with implicit density pg). To make that practical, we show that sampling from this modified density can be achieved by sampling in latent space according to an energy-based model induced by the sum of the latent prior log-density and the discriminator output score. This can be achieved by running a Langevin MCMC in latent space and then applying the generator function, which we call Discriminator Driven Latent Sampling~(DDLS). We show that DDLS is highly efficient compared to previous methods which work in the high-dimensional pixel space and can be applied to improve on previously trained GANs of many types. We evaluate DDLS on both synthetic and real-world datasets qualitatively and quantitatively. On CIFAR-10, DDLS substantially improves the Inception Score of an off-the-shelf pre-trained SN-GAN~citepsngan from 8.22 to 9.09 which is even comparable to the class-conditional BigGAN~citepbiggan model. This achieves a new state-of-the-art in unconditional image synthesis setting without introducing extra parameters or additional training.
Key facts. Cited by 71 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 19; 2022: 18; 2023: 15; 2024: 6; 2025: 13.
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- 2022Refining Generative Process with Discriminator Guidance in Score-based Diffusion Modelscited by 98
- 2023Unifying GANs and Score-Based Diffusion as Generative Particle Modelscited by 21
- 2023Complexity Matters: Rethinking the Latent Space for Generative Modelingcited by 19
- 2023Learning Energy-Based Models by Cooperative Diffusion Recovery Likelihoodcited by 19
- 2025Outsourced diffusion sampling: Efficient posterior inference in latent spaces of generative modelscited by 16
- 2025DiffRatio: Training One-Step Diffusion Models Without Teacher Supervisioncited by 8
- 2024Bring Metric Functions into Diffusion Modelscited by 7
- 2023Don't be so negative! Score-based Generative Modeling with Oracle-assisted Guidancecited by 6
- 2023Discriminator Guidance for Autoregressive Diffusion Modelscited by 5
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- 2025Heat Diffusion Models -- Interpixel Attention Mechanism28 Apr 2025
- 2025Debiasing Kernel-Based Generative Models26 Mar 2025
- 2025Improving Discriminator Guidance in Diffusion Models20 Mar 2025
- 2025Studying Classifier(-Free) Guidance From a Classifier-Centric Perspective13 Mar 2025
- 2025DiffRatio: Training One-Step Diffusion Models Without Teacher Supervision11 Feb 2025
- 2025Outsourced diffusion sampling: Efficient posterior inference in latent spaces of generative models10 Feb 2025
- 2024Bring Metric Functions into Diffusion Models4 Jan 2024
- 2023Discriminator Guidance for Autoregressive Diffusion Models24 Oct 2023
- 2023Learning Energy-Based Models by Cooperative Diffusion Recovery Likelihood10 Sep 2023
- 2023Don't be so negative! Score-based Generative Modeling with Oracle-assisted Guidance31 Jul 2023
- 2023Complexity Matters: Rethinking the Latent Space for Generative Modeling17 Jul 2023
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- 2021Deep Generative Modelling: A Comparative Review of VAEs, GANs, Normalizing Flows, Energy-Based and Autoregressive Modelscited by 251
- 2023Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MADcited by 239
- 2021Controllable and Compositional Generation with Latent-Space Energy-Based Modelscited by 64
- 2021Rebooting ACGAN: Auxiliary Classifier GANs with Stable Trainingcited by 57
- 2021Energy-Based Open-World Uncertainty Modeling for Confidence Calibrationcited by 46
- 2021Training GANs with Stronger Augmentations via Contrastive Discriminatorcited by 45
- 2022GATSBI: Generative Adversarial Training for Simulation-Based Inferencecited by 36
- 2022Unifying Generative Models with GFlowNets and Beyondcited by 24
- 2021MaGNET: Uniform Sampling from Deep Generative Network Manifolds Without Retrainingcited by 23
- 2021Local-Global MCMC kernels: the best of both worldscited by 21
- 2022Polarity Sampling: Quality and Diversity Control of Pre-Trained Generative Networks via Singular Valuescited by 21
- 2023On Sampling with Approximate Transport Mapscited by 20
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- 2025Beyond Binary Classification: A Semi-supervised Approach to Generalized AI-generated Image Detection23 Nov 2025
- 2025Adaptive Symmetrization of the KL Divergence14 Nov 2025
- 2025Exploring bidirectional bounds for minimax-training of Energy-based models5 Jun 2025
- 2025Learning Energy-Based Generative Models via Potential Flow: A Variational Principle Approach to Probability Density Homotopy Matching22 Apr 2025
- 2024Hitchhiker's guide on the relation of Energy-Based Models with other generative models, sampling and statistical physics: a comprehensive review19 Jun 2024
- 2024Deep MMD Gradient Flow without adversarial training10 May 2024
- 2024Adversarial Botometer: Adversarial Analysis for Social Bot Detection3 May 2024
- 2024Energy-based Domain-Adaptive Segmentation with Depth Guidance6 Feb 2024
- 2024Unsupervised Discovery of Steerable Factors When Graph Deep Generative Models Are Entangled29 Jan 2024
- 2023Optimal Budgeted Rejection Sampling for Generative Models1 Nov 2023
- 2023Adversarial Likelihood Estimation With One-Way Flows19 Jul 2023
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