# Commonality in Natural Images Rescues GANs: Pretraining GANs with Generic and Privacy-free Synthetic Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [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)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08232/) (2018)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [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)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Augmentation for Data-Efficient GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10738/) (2020)
- [The Secret Revealer: Generative Model-Inversion Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07135/) (2019)
- [A DIRT-T Approach to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08735/) (2018)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Few-shot Image Generation via Cross-domain Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06820/) (2021)
- [RankSRGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks with Ranker for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06382/) (2019)
- [Transferring GANs: generating images from limited data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01677/) (2018)
- [Freeze the Discriminator: a Simple Baseline for Fine-Tuning GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10964/) (2020)
- [LayoutGAN: Generating Graphic Layouts with Wireframe Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06767/) (2019)
- [Reconstruction and Membership Inference Attacks against Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03006/) (2019)
- [MineGAN: effective knowledge transfer from GANs to target domains with few images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05270/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [IPMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation Method for Training Robust Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04780/) (2023)
- [Progressive Transformation Learning for Leveraging Virtual Images in Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01778/) (2022)
- [M3Act: Learning from Synthetic Human Group Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16772/) (2023)
- [Model Synthesis for Zero-Shot Model Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15977/) (2023)
- [Diversifying Human Pose in Synthetic Data for Aerial-view Human Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15939/) (2024)
- [TDDBench: A Benchmark for Training data detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03363/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transfer learning for GANs successfully improves generation performance under low-shot regimes. However, existing studies show that the pretrained model using a single benchmark dataset is not generalized to various target datasets. More importantly, the pretrained model can be vulnerable to copyright or privacy risks as membership inference attack advances. To resolve both issues, we propose an effective and unbiased data synthesizer, namely Primitives-PS, inspired by the generic characteristics of natural images. Specifically, we utilize 1) the generic statistics on the frequency magnitude spectrum, 2) the elementary shape (i.e., image composition via elementary shapes) for representing the structure information, and 3) the existence of saliency as prior. Since our synthesizer only considers the generic properties of natural images, the single model pretrained on our dataset can be consistently transferred to various target datasets, and even outperforms the previous methods pretrained with the natural images in terms of Fr'echet inception distance. Extensive analysis, ablation study, and evaluations demonstrate that each component of our data synthesizer is effective, and provide insights on the desirable nature of the pretrained model for the transferability of GANs.