# Empirical Analysis of Overfitting and Mode Drop in GAN Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14265 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14265/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

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- [Generalization Error of GAN from the Discriminator's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03633/) (2021)
- [PQMass: Probabilistic Assessment of the Quality of Generative Models using Probability Mass Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04355/) (2024)
- [A Mathematical Framework for Learning Probability Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11481/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Health Data Poverty: Generative Approaches versus Resampling for Time-series Clinical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13958/) (2022)
- [Preserving Privacy in GANs Against Membership Inference Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03172/) (2023)
- [The Homogenization Problem in LLMs: Towards Meaningful Diversity in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06116/) (2026)
- [Satellite Chasers: Divergent Adversarial Reinforcement Learning to Engage Intelligent Adversaries on Orbit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17443/) (2024)
- [MIRA: A Score for Conditional Distribution Accuracy and Model Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02014/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We examine two key questions in GAN training, namely overfitting and mode drop, from an empirical perspective. We show that when stochasticity is removed from the training procedure, GANs can overfit and exhibit almost no mode drop. Our results shed light on important characteristics of the GAN training procedure. They also provide evidence against prevailing intuitions that GANs do not memorize the training set, and that mode dropping is mainly due to properties of the GAN objective rather than how it is optimized during training.
