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.
AUTHORS
Publisher
ICLR
Related Publications
May 26, 2026
HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
THEORY
Misalignment Between Backpropagation and the Hierarchy of Brain Responses to Images
Valentin Wyart, Huy V. Vo, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Marc Szafraniec, Max Seitzer, Patrick Labatut, Piotr Bojanowski
May 26, 2026
May 20, 2026
HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
RESEARCH
EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data
Alvin W. M. Tan, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Michael C. Frank, Angel Villar Corrales, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Dongyan Lin, Emmanuel Dupoux, Jiayi Shen, Juan Pino, Mahi Luthra, Martin Gleize, Phillip Rust, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Surya Parimi, Tom Fizycki, Vanessa Stark, Yosuke Higuchi, Youssef Benchekroun
May 20, 2026
May 18, 2026
CONVERSATIONAL AI
RESEARCH
GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains
Alexandre Rezende, Rohit Patel, Steven McClain
May 18, 2026
May 12, 2026
HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
RESEARCH
NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 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.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026