Task Specific Adversarial Cost Function

The cost function used to train a generative model should fit the purpose of the model. If the model is intended for tasks such as generating perceptually correct samples, it is beneficial to maximise the likelihood of a sample drawn from the model, Q, coming from the same distribution as the training data, P. This is equivalent to minimising the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance, KL[Q||P]. However, if the model is intended for tasks such as retrieval or classification it is beneficial to maximise the likelihood that a sample drawn from the training data is captured by the model, equivalent to minimising KL[P||Q]. The cost function used in adversarial training optimises the Jensen-Shannon entropy which can be seen as an even interpolation between KL[Q||P] and KL[P||Q]. Here, we propose an alternative adversarial cost function which allows easy tuning of the model for either task. Our task specific cost function is evaluated on a dataset of hand-written characters in the following tasks: Generation, retrieval and one-shot learning.

Adversarial Training For Sketch Retrieval

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are able to learn excellent representations for unlabelled data which can be applied to image generation and scene classification. Representations learned by GANs have not yet been applied to retrieval. In this paper, we show that the representations learned by GANs can indeed be used for retrieval. We consider heritage documents that contain unlabelled Merchant Marks, sketch-like symbols that are similar to hieroglyphs. We introduce a novel GAN architecture with design features that make it suitable for sketch retrieval. The performance of this sketch-GAN is compared to a modified version of the original GAN architecture with respect to simple invariance properties. Experiments suggest that sketch-GANs learn representations that are suitable for retrieval and which also have increased stability to rotation, scale and translation compared to the standard GAN architecture.