MemoryGAN: GAN Generator as Heterogeneous Memory for Compositional Image Synthesis

The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) has recently experienced great progress in compositional image synthesis. Unfortunately, the models proposed in the literature usually require a set of pre-defined local generators and use a separate generator to model each part object. This makes the model inflexible and also limits its scalability. Inspired by humans’ structured memory system, we propose MemoryGAN to eliminate these disadvantages. MemoryGAN uses a single generator as a shared memory to hold the heterogeneous information of the parts, and it uses a recurrent neural network to model the dependency between the parts and provide the query code for the memory. The shared memory structure and the query and feedback mechanism make MemoryGAN flexible and scalable. Our experiment shows that although MemoryGAN only uses a single generator for all the parts, it achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art, which uses multiple generators, in terms of synthesized image quality, compositional ability and disentanglement property. We believe that our result of using the generator of the GAN as a memory model will inspire future work of both bio-friendly models and memory-augmented models.