# F-Drop&Match: GANs with a Dead Zone in the High-Frequency Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [High Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13545/) (2019)
- [A Fourier Perspective on Model Robustness in Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08988/) (2019)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [MMD GAN: Towards Deeper Understanding of Moment Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08584/) (2017)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Learning in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12416/) (2020)
- [Consistency Regularization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12027/) (2019)
- [SSD-GAN: Measuring the Realness in the Spatial and Spectral Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05535/) (2020)
- [InfoMax-GAN: Improved Adversarial Image Generation via Information Maximization and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04589/) (2020)
- [On the Structural Sensitivity of Deep Convolutional Networks to the Directions of Fourier Basis Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04098/) (2018)
- [Mimicry: Towards the Reproducibility of GAN Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02494/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Unpaired Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Image Super-Resolution via Frequency-Aware Inverse-Consistency GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17269/) (2023)
- [Structure-Preserving Unpaired Image Translation to Photometrically Calibrate JunoCam with Hubble Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22668/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative adversarial networks built from deep convolutional neural networks (GANs) lack the ability to exactly replicate the high-frequency components of natural images. To alleviate this issue, we introduce two novel training techniques called frequency dropping (F-Drop) and frequency matching (F-Match). The key idea of F-Drop is to filter out unnecessary high-frequency components from the input images of the discriminators. This simple modification prevents the discriminators from being confused by perturbations of the high-frequency components. In addition, F-Drop makes the GANs focus on fitting in the low-frequency domain, in which there are the dominant components of natural images. F-Match minimizes the difference between real and fake images in the frequency domain for generating more realistic images. F-Match is implemented as a regularization term in the objective functions of the generators; it penalizes the batch mean error in the frequency domain. F-Match helps the generators to fit in the high-frequency domain filtered out by F-Drop to the real image. We experimentally demonstrate that the combination of F-Drop and F-Match improves the generative performance of GANs in both the frequency and spatial domain on multiple image benchmarks.