# ViTGAN: Training GANs with Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04589/

## Key facts

- Cited by 110 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 110)

- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12152/) (2022)
- [Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05511/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06662/) (2023)
- [Long Video Generation with Time-Agnostic VQGAN and Time-Sensitive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03638/) (2022)
- [EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01191/) (2022)
- [Diff-Instruct: A Universal Approach for Transferring Knowledge From Pre-trained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18455/) (2023)
- [LocalMamba: Visual State Space Model with Windowed Selective Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09338/) (2024)
- [StyleSwin: Transformer-based GAN for High-resolution Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10762/) (2021)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Vision Transformers for MobileNet Size and Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08059/) (2022)
- [DiffiT: Diffusion Vision Transformers for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02139/) (2023)
- [M3ViT: Mixture-of-Experts Vision Transformer for Efficient Multi-task Learning with Model-Accelerator Co-design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14793/) (2022)
- [Poisson Flow Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11178/) (2022)
- [Reflected Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04740/) (2023)
- [ActFormer: A GAN-based Transformer towards General Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07706/) (2022)
- [NoisyQuant: Noisy Bias-Enhanced Post-Training Activation Quantization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16056/) (2022)
- [Your ViT is Secretly a Hybrid Discriminative-Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07791/) (2022)
- [AnyTouch: Learning Unified Static-Dynamic Representation across Multiple Visuo-tactile Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12191/) (2025)
- [vid-TLDR: Training Free Token merging for Light-weight Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13347/) (2024)
- [StudioGAN: A Taxonomy and Benchmark of GANs for Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09479/) (2022)
- [State-of-the-Art in the Architecture, Methods and Applications of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.14020/) (2022)
- [Learning Model Predictive Controllers with Real-Time Attention for Real-World Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10780/) (2022)
- [Contractive Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13115/) (2024)
- [InstaFormer: Instance-Aware Image-to-Image Translation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16248/) (2022)
- [M2D2M: Multi-Motion Generation from Text with Discrete Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14502/) (2024)
- [Conditional Denoising Diffusion for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11433/) (2023)
- [A Recent Survey of Vision Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00634/) (2023)
- [NightLab: A Dual-level Architecture with Hardness Detection for Segmentation at Night](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05538/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown competitive performance on image recognition while requiring less vision-specific inductive biases. In this paper, we investigate if such performance can be extended to image generation. To this end, we integrate the ViT architecture into generative adversarial networks (GANs). For ViT discriminators, we observe that existing regularization methods for GANs interact poorly with self-attention, causing serious instability during training. To resolve this issue, we introduce several novel regularization techniques for training GANs with ViTs. For ViT generators, we examine architectural choices for latent and pixel mapping layers to facilitate convergence. Empirically, our approach, named ViTGAN, achieves comparable performance to the leading CNN-based GAN models on three datasets: CIFAR-10, CelebA, and LSUN bedroom.