Taming the Tail in Class-Conditional GANs: Knowledge Sharing via Unconditional Training at Lower Resolutions

Abstract

Despite extensive research on training generative adversarial networks (GANs) with limited training data, learning to generate images from long-tailed training distributions remains fairly unexplored. In the presence of imbalanced multiclass training data, GANs tend to favor classes with more samples, leading to the generation of low quality and less diverse samples in tail classes. In this study, we aim to improve the training of class-conditional GANs with long-tailed data. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for knowledge sharing, allowing tail classes to borrow from the rich information from classes with more abundant training data. More concretely, we propose modifications to existing class-conditional GAN architectures to ensure that the lower-resolution layers of the generator are trained entirely unconditionally while reserving class-conditional generation for the higher-resolution layers. Experiments on several long-tail benchmarks and GAN architectures demonstrate a significant improvement over existing methods in both the diversity and fidelity of the generated images. The code is available at https:github.com/khorrams/utlo.