Variants and Applications of Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial network (GAN) has been extensively applied in many fields since it was first proposed in 2014. There have been ongoing attempts at improving the model and developing its extensions. The basic idea behind GAN stems from the two-player zero-sum game. Composed of a generator and a discriminator, GAN is trained through a "battle" between the two networks, where the generator tries to fool the discriminator. In contrast, the discriminator tries not to be deceived. The purpose is to estimate the potential distribution of data samples and generate new data samples. GAN is currently being studied in computer vision, language processing, and information security and is still far from reaching its potential. Since there are limited existing resources on GAN reviews, this paper provides a comprehensive review of a few of the most important GAN variants. We divided the variants into three categories: foundation, extension, and advanced, gave an overview of each architecture, and analyzed their advantages and disadvantages. We also summarized some of the most popular applications of GAN, and finally, we brought up the problems of GAN-based architectures that have yet to be solved and pointed out the future direction of GAN research and development.