College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Congratulations to our PhD student, Shiao Liu for successfully presenting his dissertation via Zoom!
Congratulations Shiao!
Error Analyses of Deep Generative Models
Abstract:
As powerful unsupervised deep learning methods for learning and sampling from complex data distributions, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved remarkable success in many machine learning tasks such as image synthesis, video prediction, and natural language generation. However, theoretical explanations for their empirical success are not well established.
This work studies the convergence rates of GANs and the variants under a collection of integral probability metrics defined through Lipschitz classes, including the Wasserstein distance. We show that GANs and the variants are able to adaptively learn data distributions with low-dimensional structures when the neural network architectures are specified properly. In particular, for distributions concentrated around a low-dimensional manifold, we show that the learning rates of GANs and the variants do not depend on the high ambient dimension, but on the lower intrinsic dimension of the manifold, which explains why GANs are able to mitigate the curse of dimensionality in the learning process. The analyses are based on new oracle inequalities decomposing the estimation error into approximation and statistical errors.
Committee Chair: Jian Huang
Committee Members: Aixin Tan, Boxiang Wang, N.D. Shymalkumar, Tianboa Yang (Computer Science)