  Unconditional image generation has recently been dominated by generative
adversarial networks (GANs). GAN methods train a generator which regresses
images from random noise vectors, as well as a discriminator that attempts to
differentiate between the generated images and a training set of real images.
GANs have shown amazing results at generating realistic looking images. Despite
their success, GANs suffer from critical drawbacks including: unstable training
and mode-dropping. The weaknesses in GANs have motivated research into
alternatives including: variational auto-encoders (VAEs), latent embedding
learning methods (e.g. GLO) and nearest-neighbor based implicit maximum
likelihood estimation (IMLE). Unfortunately at the moment, GANs still
significantly outperform the alternative methods for image generation. In this
work, we present a novel method - Generative Latent Nearest Neighbors (GLANN) -
for training generative models without adversarial training. GLANN combines the
strengths of IMLE and GLO in a way that overcomes the main drawbacks of each
method. Consequently, GLANN generates images that are far better than GLO and
IMLE. Our method does not suffer from mode collapse which plagues GAN training
and is much more stable. Qualitative results show that GLANN outperforms a
baseline consisting of 800 GANs and VAEs on commonly used datasets. Our models
are also shown to be effective for training truly non-adversarial unsupervised
image translation.
