Leveraging GANs to Improve Continuous Path Keyboard Input Models

Continuous path keyboard input has higher inherent ambiguity than standard tapping, because the path trace may exhibit not only local overshoots/undershoots (as in tapping) but also, depending on the user, substantial mid-path excursions. Deploying a robust solution thus requires a large amount of high-quality training data, which is difficult to collect/annotate. In this work, we address this challenge by using GANs to augment our training corpus with user-realistic synthetic data. Experiments show that, even though GAN-generated data does not capture all the characteristics of real user data, it still provides a substantial boost in accuracy at a 5:1 GAN-to-real ratio. GANs therefore inject more robustness in the model through greatly increased word coverage and path diversity.