# A Novel Generator with Auxiliary Branch for Improving GAN Performance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.14968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14968/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [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)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Gated-Attention Feature-Fusion Based Framework for Poverty Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19690/) (2024)
- [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)

The generator in the generative adversarial network (GAN) learns image generation in a coarse-to-fine manner in which earlier layers learn the overall structure of the image and the latter ones refine the details. To propagate the coarse information well, recent works usually build their generators by stacking up multiple residual blocks. Although the residual block can produce a high-quality image as well as be trained stably, it often impedes the information flow in the network. To alleviate this problem, this brief introduces a novel generator architecture that produces the image by combining features obtained through two different branches: the main and auxiliary branches. The goal of the main branch is to produce the image by passing through the multiple residual blocks, whereas the auxiliary branch is to convey the coarse information in the earlier layer to the later one. To combine the features in the main and auxiliary branches successfully, we also propose a gated feature fusion module that controls the information flow in those branches. To prove the superiority of the proposed method, this brief provides extensive experiments using various standard datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, LSUN, CelebA-HQ, AFHQ, and tiny-ImageNet. Furthermore, we conducted various ablation studies to demonstrate the generalization ability of the proposed method. Quantitative evaluations prove that the proposed method exhibits impressive GAN performance in terms of Inception score (IS) and Frechet inception distance (FID). For instance, the proposed method boosts the FID and IS scores on the tiny-ImageNet dataset from 35.13 to 25.00 and 20.23 to 25.57, respectively.