Generative adversarial learning with optimal input dimension and its adaptive generator architecture

We investigate the impact of the input dimension on the generalization error in generative adversarial networks (GANs). In particular, we first provide both theoretical and practical evidence to validate the existence of an optimal input dimension (OID) that minimizes the generalization error. Then, to identify the OID, we introduce a novel framework called generalized GANs (G-GANs), which includes existing GANs as a special case. By incorporating the group penalty and the architecture penalty developed in the paper, G-GANs have several intriguing features. First, our framework offers adaptive dimensionality reduction from the initial dimension to a dimension necessary for generating the target distribution. Second, this reduction in dimensionality also shrinks the required size of the generator network architecture, which is automatically identified by the proposed architecture penalty. Both reductions in dimensionality and the generator network significantly improve the stability and the accuracy of the estimation and prediction. Theoretical support for the consistent selection of the input dimension and the generator network is provided. Third, the proposed algorithm involves an end-to-end training process, and the algorithm allows for dynamic adjustments between the input dimension and the generator network during training, further enhancing the overall performance of G-GANs. Extensive experiments conducted with simulated and benchmark data demonstrate the superior performance of G-GANs. In particular, compared to that of off-the-shelf methods, G-GANs achieves an average improvement of 45.68% in the CT slice dataset, 43.22% in the MNIST dataset and 46.94% in the FashionMNIST dataset in terms of the maximum mean discrepancy or Frechet inception distance. Moreover, the features generated based on the input dimensions identified by G-GANs align with visually significant features.