# GAN Cocktail: mixing GANs without dataset access

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03847 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03847/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [LEEP: A New Measure to Evaluate Transferability of Learned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12462/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Latent Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04467/) (2020)
- [Seeing What a GAN Cannot Generate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11626/) (2019)
- [Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10225/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07666/) (2024)
- [Sketch Your Own GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02774/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Soup: Model Merging for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08431/) (2024)
- [Sens-Merging: Sensitivity-Guided Parameter Balancing for Merging Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12420/) (2025)
- [Scalable Model Merging with Progressive Layer-wise Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12706/) (2025)
- [LAMP: Data-Efficient Linear Affine Weight-Space Models for Parameter-Controlled 3D Shape Generation and Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22491/) (2025)
- [Bayesian Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13484/) (2023)
- [Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22157/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Today's generative models are capable of synthesizing high-fidelity images, but each model specializes on a specific target domain. This raises the need for model merging: combining two or more pretrained generative models into a single unified one. In this work we tackle the problem of model merging, given two constraints that often come up in the real world: (1) no access to the original training data, and (2) without increasing the size of the neural network. To the best of our knowledge, model merging under these constraints has not been studied thus far. We propose a novel, two-stage solution. In the first stage, we transform the weights of all the models to the same parameter space by a technique we term model rooting. In the second stage, we merge the rooted models by averaging their weights and fine-tuning them for each specific domain, using only data generated by the original trained models. We demonstrate that our approach is superior to baseline methods and to existing transfer learning techniques, and investigate several applications.