Introducing generative adversarial networks

Let's first look at the foundations of GAN models. The overall objective of a GAN is to synthesize new data that has the same distribution as its training dataset. Therefore, GANs, in their original form, are considered to be in the unsupervised learning category of machine learning tasks, since no labeled data is required. It is worth noting, however, that extensions made to the original GAN can lie in both semi-supervised and supervised tasks.

The general GAN concept was first proposed in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues as a method for synthesizing new images using deep neural networks (NNs) (Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A. and Bengio, Y., Generative Adversarial Nets, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 2672-2680, 2014). While the initial GAN architecture proposed in this paper was based on fully connected layers, similar to multilayer...