# An Empirical Study of the Effects of Sample-Mixing Methods for Efficient Training of Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03535/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (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)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [Toward Controlled Generation of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00955/) (2017)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [MixUp as Locally Linear Out-Of-Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02499/) (2018)
- [Consistency Regularization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12027/) (2019)
- [Stabilizing Training of Generative Adversarial Networks through Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09367/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is well-known that training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) requires huge iterations before the generator's providing good-quality samples. Although there are several studies to tackle this problem, there is still no universal solution. In this paper, we investigated the effect of sample mixing methods, that is, Mixup, CutMix, and newly proposed Smoothed Regional Mix (SRMix), to alleviate this problem. The sample-mixing methods are known to enhance the accuracy and robustness in the wide range of classification problems, and can naturally be applicable to GANs because the role of the discriminator can be interpreted as the classification between real and fake samples. We also proposed a new formalism applying the sample-mixing methods to GANs with the saturated losses which do not have a clear "label" of real and fake. We performed a vast amount of numerical experiments using LSUN and CelebA datasets. The results showed that Mixup and SRMix improved the quality of the generated images in terms of FID in most cases, in particular, SRMix showed the best improvement in most cases. Our analysis indicates that the mixed-samples can provide different properties from the vanilla fake samples, and the mixing pattern strongly affects the decision of the discriminators. The generated images of Mixup have good high-level feature but low-level feature is not so impressible. On the other hand, CutMix showed the opposite tendency. Our SRMix showed the middle tendency, that is, showed good high and low level features. We believe that our finding provides a new perspective to accelerate the GANs convergence and improve the quality of generated samples.