# PConv: Simple yet Effective Convolutional Layer for Generative Adversarial Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10841 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10841/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [Differentiable Augmentation for Data-Efficient GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10738/) (2020)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10916/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10686/) (2025)
- [A Novel Generator with Auxiliary Branch for Improving GAN Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14968/) (2021)
- [Effective Shortcut Technique for GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11351/) (2022)
- [Improving GANs with a Feature Cycling Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09638/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel convolutional layer, called perturbed convolution (PConv), which focuses on achieving two goals simultaneously: improving the generative adversarial network (GAN) performance and alleviating the memorization problem in which the discriminator memorizes all images from a given dataset as training progresses. In PConv, perturbed features are generated by randomly disturbing an input tensor before performing the convolution operation. This approach is simple but surprisingly effective. First, to produce a similar output even with the perturbed tensor, each layer in the discriminator should learn robust features having a small local Lipschitz value. Second, since the input tensor is randomly perturbed during the training procedure like the dropout in neural networks, the memorization problem could be alleviated. To show the generalization ability of the proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments with various loss functions and datasets including CIFAR-10, CelebA, CelebA-HQ, LSUN, and tiny-ImageNet. The quantitative evaluations demonstrate that PConv effectively boosts the performance of GAN and conditional GAN in terms of Frechet inception distance (FID).