Multi-adversarial autoencoders: Stable, faster and self-adaptive representation learning

The variational autoencoder (VAE) and generative adversarial networks (GAN) are two prominent approaches to achieving a probabilistic generative model by way of an autoencoder and a two-player minimax game. While VAEs often suffer from over-simplified posterior approximations, the adversarial autoencoder (AAE) has shown promise by adopting GAN to match the variational posterior to an arbitrary prior through adversarial training. Both VAEs and GANs face significant challenges such as training stability, mode collapse, and difficulty in extracting meaningful latent representations. In this paper, we propose the Multi-adversarial Autoencoder (MAAE), which extends the AAE framework by incorporating multiple discriminators and enabling soft-ensemble feedback. By adaptively regulating the collective feedback from multiple discriminators, MAAE captures a balance between fitting the data distribution and performing accurate inference and accelerates training stability while extracting meaningful and interpretable latent representations. Experimental evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10, and CelebA datasets demonstrate significant improvements in latent representation, quality of generated samples, log-likelihood, and a pairwise comparison metric, with comparisons to recent methods. •MAAE is a novel generative model leveraging autoencoder and multiple discriminators.•MAAE automatically balances mutual information and inference quality via ensemble.•MAAE demonstrates improved stability and faster convergence, and meaningful features.•Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CelebA showcase superior results.