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MSG-STYLEGAN-TF

Official code repository for the paper "MSG-GAN: Multi-Scale Gradients for Generative Adversarial Networks" [arXiv]

Why this repository?

Our previous research work released the BMSG-GAN code in PyTorch which applied our proposed multi-scale connections in the basic ProGAN architecture (i.e. DCGAN architecture) instead of using the progressive growing. This repository applies the Multi-scale Gradient connections in StyleGAN replacing the progressive growing used for training original StyleGAN. The switch to Tensorflow was primarily to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison with StyleGAN.

Due Credit

This code heavily uses NVIDIA's original StyleGAN code. We accredit and acknowledge their work here. The Original License is located in the base directory (file named LICENSE_ORIGINAL.txt).

Abstract

While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have seen huge successes in image synthesis tasks, they are notoriously difficult to adapt to different datasets, in part due to instability during training and sensitivity to hyperparameters. One commonly accepted reason for this instability is that gradients passing from the discriminator to the generator become uninformative when there isn’t enough overlap in the supports of the real and fake distributions. In this work, we propose the Multi-Scale Gradient Generative Adversarial Network (MSG-GAN), a simple but effective technique for addressing this by allowing the flow of gradients from the discriminator to the generator at multiple scales. This technique provides a stable approach for high resolution image synthesis, and serves as an alternative to the commonly used progressive growing technique. We show that MSG-GAN converges stably on a variety of image datasets of different sizes, resolutions and domains, as well as different types of loss functions and architectures, all with the same set of fixed hyperparameters. When compared to state-of-the-art GANs, our approach matches or exceeds the performance in most of the cases we tried.

Method overview

Architecture of MSG-GAN, shown here on the base model proposed in ProGANs. Our architecture includes connections from the intermediate layers of the generator to the intermediate layers of the discriminator. Multi-scale images sent to the discriminator are concatenated with the corresponding activation volumes obtained from the main path of convolutional layers followed by a combine function (shown in yellow).

StyleGAN Modifications:

The MSG-StyleGAN model (in this repository) uses all the modifications proposed by StyleGAN to the ProGANs architecture except the mixing regularization. Similar to MSG-ProGAN (diagram above), we use a 1 x 1 conv layer to obtain the RGB images output from every block of the StyleGAN generator leaving everything else (mapping network, non-traditional input and style adaIN) untouched. The discriminator architecture is same as the ProGANs (and consequently MSG-ProGAN) discriminator.

System requirements

The code was built and tested for:

• 64-bit Python 3.6.7
• TensorFlow 1.13.1 with GPU support.
• NVIDIA GPUs with at least 16GB of DRAM. We used variants of the Tesla V100 GPUs.
• NVIDIA driver 418.56, CUDA toolkit 10.1, cuDNN 7.3.1.

How to run the code (Training)

Training can be run in the following 3 steps:

Step 1: Data formatting

The MSG-StyleGAN training pipeline expects the dataset to be in tfrecord format. This sped up the training to a great extent. Use the dataset_tool.py tool to generate these tfrecords from your raw dataset. In order to use the tool, either select from the bunch of datasets that it already provides or use the create_from_images option if you have a new dataset in the form of images. For full options and more information run:

(your_virtual_env)$ python dataset_tool.py --help

Step 2: Run the training script

First step is to update the paths in the global configuration located in config.py. For instance:

"""Global configuration."""

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Paths.
    
result_dir = "/home/karnewar/self_research/msg-stylegan/"
data_dir = "/media/datasets_external/"
cache_dir = "/home/karnewar/self_research/msg-stylegan/cache"
run_dir_ignore = ["results", "datasets", "cache"]

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The result_dir is where all the trained models, training logs and evaluation score logs will be reported. The data_dir should contain the different datasets used for training under separate subdirectories, while the cache_dir stores any repeatedly required objects in the training. For instance the Mean and Std of the real images while calculating the FID.

Following this, download the inception net weights from here and place them in result_dir + "/inception_network/inception_v3_features.pkl".

Finally, modify the configurations in the train.py as per your situation and start training by just running the train.py script.

(your_virtual_env)$ python train.py

Pretrained models

How to use pretrained models

We provide three scripts generate_multiscale_samples.py, generate_samples.py and latent_space_interpolation_video.py which can be used to generate multi-scale generated images grids, highest resolution samples and latent space interpolation video respectively. Please see the below example.

(your_virtual_env)$ python latent_space_interpolation_video.py \
--pickle_file /home/karnewar/msg-stylegan/00004-msg-stylegan-visual_art-4gpu/best_model.pkl \
--output_file /home/karnewar/msg-stylegan/visual_art_interpolation_hd.avi \
--num_points 30 \
--transition_points 30 \
--resize 800 1920 \

How to run evaluation

The training pipeline already computes the metric during training along with a tensorboard log. But, in case you wish to evaluate the trained models again for research baseline (or for some other reason, say fast training and separate evaluation), Please use the run_metrics.py script. Modify the following lines according to your situation:

tasks = []
tasks += [
    EasyDict(
        run_func_name="run_metrics.run_pickle",
        network_pkl="/home/karnewar/msg-stylegan/00002-msg-stylegan-indian_celebs-4gpu/network-snapshot.pkl",
        dataset_args=EasyDict(tfrecord_dir="indian_celebs/tfrecords", shuffle_mb=0),
        mirror_augment=True,
    )
]  
# tasks += [EasyDict(run_func_name='run_metrics.run_snapshot', run_id=100, snapshot=25000)]
# tasks += [EasyDict(run_func_name='run_metrics.run_all_snapshots', run_id=100)]

# How many GPUs to use?
submit_config.num_gpus = 1
# submit_config.num_gpus = 2
# submit_config.num_gpus = 4
# submit_config.num_gpus = 8

and run:

(your_virtual_env)$ python run_metrics.py

The run_snapshot and run_pickle do practically the same thing with the minor exception of the usage. The former needs a snapshot_id and run_id and the files are located automatically, whereas the latter needs the pickle file to be provided. I personally find the run_pickle much more useful. The run_all_snapshots function takes the run_id and evaluates all snapshots located in that run_dir.

Stability and Ease of Use :)

Usually, it is the case that stability and easy usage are not the terms that you'd use in the context of a GAN :laughing:. But with the multi-scale gradients in the GAN, the training is quite stable. We show a juxtaposing experiment for this as follows:

We quantify the image stability during training. These plots show the MSE between images generated from the same latent code at the beginning of sequential epochs (averaged over 36 latent samples) on the CelebA-HQ dataset. MSG-GAN converges stably over time while Progressive Growing continues to vary significantly across epochs. Please note that the first half of the epochs are spent in fading in the new layer, but apparently, even for the subsequent epochs, the changes made are quite significant.

During training, all the layers in the MSG-GAN synchronize across the generated resolutions fairly early in the training and subsequently improve the quality of the generated images at all scales simultaneously. Throughout the training the generator makes only minimal incremental improvements to the images generated from fixed latent points.

Qualitative examples

Cite our work

@article{karnewar2019msg,
  title={MSG-GAN: Multi-Scale Gradients for Generative Adversarial Networks},
  author={Karnewar, Animesh and Wang, Oliver},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.06048},
  year={2019}
}

Other contributors

Please feel free to open PRs here if you train on other datasets using this architecture. <br>

Thanks and regards

[:star: New :star:] Please check out my new IG handle @the_GANista. I will be posting fun GAN based visual art here. :).

Thank you all for supporting and encouraging my work. I hope this will be useful for your research / project / work.

As always, any suggestion / feedback / contribution is always welcome :smile:.

Cheers :beers:! <br> @akanimax :)