Generative adversarial networks
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) was first introduced by Ian J Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio in their paper, Generative Adversarial Networks, in 2014.
GANs are used extensively for generating new data points. They can be applied to any type of dataset, but they are popularly used for generating images. Some of the applications of GANs include generating realistic human faces, converting grayscale images to colored images, translating text descriptions into realistic images, and many more.
GANs have evolved so much in recent years that they can generate a very realistic image. The following figure shows the evolution of GANs in generating images over the course of five years:
Figure 7.42: Evolution of GANs over the years
Excited about GANs already? Now, we will see how exactly they work. Before going ahead, let's consider...