DuelGAN: A Duel Between Two Discriminators Stabilizes the GAN Training
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Abstract (arXiv)
In this paper, we introduce DuelGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) solution to improve the stability of the generated samples and to mitigate mode collapse. Built upon the Vanilla GAN's two-player game between the discriminator D1 and the generator G, we introduce a peer discriminator D2 to the min-max game. Similar to previous work using two discriminators, the first role of both D1, D2 is to distinguish between generated samples and real ones, while the generator tries to generate high-quality samples which are able to fool both discriminators. Different from existing methods, we introduce another game between D1 and D2 to discourage their agreement and therefore increase the level of diversity of the generated samples. This property alleviates the issue of early mode collapse by preventing D1 and D2 from converging too fast. We provide theoretical analysis for the equilibrium of the min-max game formed among G, D1, D2. We offer convergence behavior of DuelGAN as well as stability of the min-max game. It's worth mentioning that DuelGAN operates in the unsupervised setting, and the duel between D1 and D2 does not need any label supervision. Experiments results on a synthetic dataset and on real-world image datasets (MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10, CelebA, VGG, and FFHQ) demonstrate that DuelGAN outperforms competitive baseline work in generating diverse and high-quality samples, while only introduces negligible computation cost.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 50 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2021.
Builds on
50 of 61 references.
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38 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 0; 2023: 0; 2024: 0; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
4 papers.
- 2025OFFSIDE: Benchmarking Unlearning Misinformation in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 7
- 2021The Deep Generative Decoder: MAP estimation of representations improves modeling of single-cell RNA datacited by 2
- 2025Assessing the Distributional Fidelity of Synthetic Chest X-rays using the Embedded Characteristic Scorecited by 1
- 2026StatD2GAN: When Calibration Masks Generator Quality in Held-Out Evaluation of Synthetic Weather Sequencescited by 0
- 2026StatD2GAN: When Calibration Masks Generator Quality in Held-Out Evaluation of Synthetic Weather Sequences27 Sep 2026
- 2025OFFSIDE: Benchmarking Unlearning Misinformation in Multimodal Large Language Models26 Oct 2025
- 2025Assessing the Distributional Fidelity of Synthetic Chest X-rays using the Embedded Characteristic Score1 Jan 2025
- 2021The Deep Generative Decoder: MAP estimation of representations improves modeling of single-cell RNA data13 Oct 2021