SDA at NIPS 2017

NipsWe are very pleased to announce that our group got a paper accepted for presentation at the workshop on Optimal Transport and Machine Learning (http://otml17.marcocuturi.net) at  NIPS 2017 : The Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, which was held on December 4 – 9, 2017 in Long Beach, California.

The Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a single-track machine learning and computational neuroscience conference that includes invited talks, demonstrations and oral and poster presentations of refereed papers.  NIPS has a responsibility to provide an inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone in the fields of AI and machine learning. Unfortunately, several events held at (or in conjunction with) this year’s conference fell short of these standards.

Here is the accepted paper with its abstract:

On the regularization of Wasserstein GANsby Henning Petzka, Asja Fischer, Denis Lukovnikov.

Abstract: Since their invention, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have become a popular approach for learning to model a distribution of real (unlabeled) data. Convergence problems during training are overcome by Wasserstein GANs which minimize the distance between the model and the empirical distribution in terms of a different metric, but thereby introduce a Lipschitz constraint into the optimization problem. A simple way to enforce the Lipschitz constraint on the class of functions, which can be modeled by the neural network, is weight clipping. Augmenting the loss by a regularization term that penalizes the deviation of the gradient norm of the critic (as a function of the network’s input) from one, was proposed as an alternative that improves training. We present theoretical arguments why using a weaker regularization term enforcing the Lipschitz constraint is preferable. These arguments are supported by experimental results on several data sets.


Acknowledgments
This part of work is supported by WDAqua : Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (GA no. 642795).