EmbeddGAN: A Novel GAN Framework Using an Embedding Network and Gini Distance Correlation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated strong performance in generating high-quality synthetic data. However, they are limited by no formal guarantees regarding convergence and the effectiveness of the learning process. In practice, this leads to training instability, mode collapse, and sensitivity to hyperparameters. To address this, we propose EmbeddGAN, a novel adversarial training framework based on a dependence-based objective. Instead of relying on a discriminator that classifies samples as real or fake, EmbeddGAN introduces an embedding network that learns a representation in which statistical dependence between samples and their real/fake labels is maximized, while the generator is trained to minimize this dependence. This objective is implemented using the Gini distance correlation (gCor), which equals zero if and only if the embeddings are statistically independent of the real/fake label. Minimizing this objective therefore encourages real and generated samples to become statistically indistinguishable in the learned embedding space. The embedding network projects both real and generated data into a shared low-dimensional space, where distributional discrepancies can be measured directly through pairwise distances. We adopt a minimax training strategy: the embedding network maximizes the Gini distance correlation (maximizing dependence), while the generator minimizes it (minimizing dependence). Experiments on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CelebA datasets demonstrate that EmbeddGAN achieves competitive performance relative to established baselines while exhibiting notably stable training dynamics on the evaluated datasets.