Spatial Coevolution for Generative Adversarial Network Training

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are difficult to train because of pathologies such as mode and discriminator collapse. Similar pathologies have been studied and addressed in competitive evolutionary computation by increased diversity. We study a system, Lipizzaner, that combines spatial coevolution with gradient-based learning to improve the robustness and scalability of GAN training. We study different features of Lipizzaner's evolutionary computation methodology. Our ablation experiments determine that communication, selection, parameter optimization, and ensemble optimization each, as well as in combination, play critical roles. Lipizzaner succumbs less frequently to critical collapses and, as a side benefit, demonstrates improved performance. In addition, we show a GAN-training feature of Lipizzaner: the ability to train simultaneously with different loss functions in the gradient descent parameter learning framework of each GAN at each cell. We use an image generation problem to show that different loss function combinations result in models with better accuracy and more diversity in comparison to other existing evolutionary GAN models. Finally, Lipizzaner with multiple loss function options promotes the best model diversity while requiring a large grid size for adequate accuracy. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.