Conjugate Gradient Method for Generative Adversarial Networks

While the generative model has many advantages, it is not feasible to calculate the Jensen-Shannon divergence of the density function of the data and the density function of the model of deep neural networks; for this reason, various alternative approaches have been developed. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be used to formulate this problem as a discriminative problem with two models, a generator and a discriminator whose learning can be formulated in the context of game theory and the local Nash equilibrium. Since this optimization is more difficult than minimization of a single objective function, we propose to apply the conjugate gradient method to solve the local Nash equilibrium problem in GANs. We give a proof and convergence analysis under mild assumptions showing that the proposed method converges to a local Nash equilibrium with three different learning-rate schedules including a constant learning rate. Furthermore, we demonstrate the convergence of a simple toy problem to a local Nash equilibrium and compare the proposed method with other optimization methods in experiments using real-world data, finding that the proposed method outperforms stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and momentum SGD.