# Generative Convolution Layer for Image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (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)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (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)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10916/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Inferring Semantic Layout for Hierarchical Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05091/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised GANs via Auxiliary Rotation Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11212/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Applications of Large Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17132/) (2025)
- [A Novel Generator with Auxiliary Branch for Improving GAN Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14968/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Image Skip Connections in StyleGAN2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05527/) (2024)
- [Effective Shortcut Technique for GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11351/) (2022)
- [Improving GANs with a Feature Cycling Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09638/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a novel convolution method, called generative convolution (GConv), which is simple yet effective for improving the generative adversarial network (GAN) performance. Unlike the standard convolution, GConv first selects useful kernels compatible with the given latent vector, and then linearly combines the selected kernels to make latent-specific kernels. Using the latent-specific kernels, the proposed method produces the latent-specific features which encourage the generator to produce high-quality images. This approach is simple but surprisingly effective. First, the GAN performance is significantly improved with a little additional hardware cost. Second, GConv can be employed to the existing state-of-the-art generators without modifying the network architecture. To reveal the superiority of GConv, this paper provides extensive experiments using various standard datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, LSUN-Church, CelebA, and tiny-ImageNet. Quantitative evaluations prove that GConv significantly boosts the performances of the unconditional and conditional GANs in terms of Inception score (IS) and Frechet inception distance (FID). For example, the proposed method improves both FID and IS scores on the tiny-ImageNet dataset from 35.13 to 29.76 and 20.23 to 22.64, respectively.