Introspective Neural Networks for Generative Modeling

We study unsupervised learning by developing a generative model built from progressively learned deep convolutional neural networks. The resulting generator is additionally a discriminator, capable of "introspection" in a sense - being able to self-evaluate the difference between its generated samples and the given training data. Through repeated discriminative learning, desirable properties of modern discriminative classifiers are directly inherited by the generator. Specifically, our model learns a sequence of CNN classifiers using a synthesis-by-classification algorithm. In the experiments, we observe encouraging results on a number of applications including texture modeling, artistic style transferring, face modeling, and unsupervised feature learning.