Evolutionary Generative Adversarial Networks with Crossover Based Knowledge Distillation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) is an adversarial model, and it has been demonstrated to be effective for various generative tasks. However, GAN and its variants also suffer from many training problems, such as mode collapse and gradient vanish. In this paper, we firstly propose a general crossover operator, which can be widely applied to GANs using evolutionary strategies. Then we design an evolutionary GAN framework named C-GAN based on it. And we combine the crossover operator with evolutionary generative adversarial networks (E-GAN) to implement the evolutionary generative adversarial networks with crossover (CE-GAN). Under the premise that a variety of loss functions are used as mutation operators to generate mutation individuals, we evaluate the generated samples and allow the mutation individuals to learn experiences from the output in a knowledge distillation manner, imitating the best output outcome, resulting in better offspring. Then, we greedily select the best offspring as parents for subsequent training using discriminator as an evaluator. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CE-GAN and show that our method is competitive in terms of generated images quality and time efficiency.