Multi-adversarial Variational Autoencoder Networks

The unsupervised training of GANs and VAEs has enabled them to generate realistic images mimicking real-world distributions and perform unsupervised clustering or semi-supervised classification of images. Combining the power of these two generative models, we introduce a novel network architecture, Multi-Adversarial Variational autoEncoder Networks (MAVENs), which incorporate an ensemble of discriminators in a combined VAE-GAN network, with simultaneous adversarial learning and variational inference. We apply MAVENs to the generation of synthetic images and propose a new distribution measure to evaluate the quality of the generated images. Our experimental results using the computer vision datasets SVHN and CIFAR-10 demonstrate competitive performance against state-of-the-art semi-supervised models both in image generation and classification tasks.