# GenCo: Generative Co-training for Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01254 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01254/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [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)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (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)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [Differentiable Augmentation for Data-Efficient GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10738/) (2020)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00734/) (2018)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [EdgeConnect: Generative Image Inpainting with Adversarial Edge Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00212/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18319/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Generative Modeling with Limited Data, Few Shots, and Zero Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14397/) (2023)
- [FakeCLR: Exploring Contrastive Learning for Solving Latent Discontinuity in Data-Efficient GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08630/) (2022)
- [KD-DLGAN: Data Limited Image Generation via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17158/) (2023)
- [Face Transformer: Towards High Fidelity and Accurate Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02530/) (2023)
- [Image Synthesis under Limited Data: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16879/) (2023)
- [Generative Artificial Intelligence Meets Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05027/) (2024)
- [Augmentation-Aware Self-Supervision for Data-Efficient GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15677/) (2022)
- [Deep Generative Modeling on Limited Data with Regularization by Nontransferable Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14133/) (2022)
- [Smoothness Similarity Regularization for Few-Shot GAN Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09717/) (2023)
- [CHAIN: Enhancing Generalization in Data-Efficient GANs via lipsCHitz continuity constrAIned Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00521/) (2024)
- [MS3D: A RG Flow-Based Regularization for GAN Training with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11135/) (2024)
- [Style Quantization for Data-Efficient GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24282/) (2025)
- [HP-GAN: Harnessing pretrained networks for GAN improvement with FakeTwins and discriminator consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03039/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training effective Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) requires large amounts of training data, without which the trained models are usually sub-optimal with discriminator over-fitting. Several prior studies address this issue by expanding the distribution of the limited training data via massive and hand-crafted data augmentation. We handle data-limited image generation from a very different perspective. Specifically, we design GenCo, a Generative Co-training network that mitigates the discriminator over-fitting issue by introducing multiple complementary discriminators that provide diverse supervision from multiple distinctive views in training. We instantiate the idea of GenCo in two ways. The first way is Weight-Discrepancy Co-training (WeCo) which co-trains multiple distinctive discriminators by diversifying their parameters. The second way is Data-Discrepancy Co-training (DaCo) which achieves co-training by feeding discriminators with different views of the input images (e.g., different frequency components of the input images). Extensive experiments over multiple benchmarks show that GenCo achieves superior generation with limited training data. In addition, GenCo also complements the augmentation approach with consistent and clear performance gains when combined.