RESEARCH

A Closer Look at the Optimization Landscapes of Generative Adversarial Networks

April 17, 2020

Abstract

Generative adversarial networks have been very successful in generative modeling, however they remain relatively challenging to train compared to standard deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose new visualization techniques for the optimization landscapes of GANs that enable us to study the game vector field resulting from the concatenation of the gradient of both players. Using these visualization techniques we try to bridge the gap between theory and practice by showing empirically that the training of GANs exhibits significant rotations around Local Stable Stationary Points (LSSP), similar to the one predicted by theory on toy examples. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence that GAN training converge to a stable stationary point which is a saddle point for the generator loss, not a minimum, while still achieving excellent performance.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Pascal Vincent

Hugo Bérard

Amjad Almahairi

Gauthier Gidel

Simon Lacoste-Julien

Publisher

ICLR

Related Publications

May 06, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models

Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Elisa Cascardi, Hubert Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean-Rémi King, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 06, 2026

April 16, 2026

RESEARCH

AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents

Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Alisia Lupidi, Anton Protopopov, Bassel Al Omari, Carole-Jean Wu, Derek Dunfield, Despoina Magka, Edan Toledo, Hela Momand, Ishita Mediratta, Jakob Foerster, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Karen Hambardzumyan, Kelvin Niu, Martin Josifoski, Michael Kuchnik, Michael Shvartsman, Nicolas Baldwin, Parth Pathak, Rishi Hazra, Tatiana Shavrina, Thomas Simon Foster, Yoram Bachrach

April 16, 2026

March 17, 2026

RESEARCH

NLP

Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages

Omnilingual MT Team, Niyati Bafna, Ioannis Tsiamas, Mark Duppenthaler, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Andrea Caciolai, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Chierh CHENG, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, David Dale, Edan Toledo, Eduardo Sánchez, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mary Williamson, Nate Ekberg, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Rashel Moritz, Shireen Yates, Surya Parimi

March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

RESEARCH

SPEECH & AUDIO

Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech

Omnilingual SONAR Team, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Jaehyeong Jo, Alexandre Mourachko, Yu-An Chung, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Christophe Ropers, David Dale, Holger Schwenk, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Loic Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot

March 17, 2026

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.