“Improving Generative Adversarial Networks using Game Theory and Statistics”

Speaker: Constantinos Daskalakis
Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT

Wednesday, September 12, 12:00-1:00pm

Location: Yale Institute for Network Science, 17 Hillhouse Ave, Room 328

Talk summary: Generative Adversarial Networks (aka GANs) are a recently proposed approach for learning samplers of high-dimensional distributions with intricate structure, such as distributions over natural images, given samples from these distributions. They are obtained by setting up a two-player zero-sum game between two neural networks, which learn statistics of a target distribution by adapting their strategies in the game using gradient descent. Despite their intriguing performance in practice, GANs pose great challenges to both optimization and statistics. Their training suffers from oscillations, and they are difficult to scale to high-dimensional settings. We study how game-theoretic and statistical techniques can be brought to bear on these important challenges. We use Game Theory towards improving GAN training, and Statistics towards scaling up the dimensionality of the generated distributions.