  Generative adversarial nets (GANs) and variational auto-encoders have
significantly improved our distribution modeling capabilities, showing promise
for dataset augmentation, image-to-image translation and feature learning.
However, to model high-dimensional distributions, sequential training and
stacked architectures are common, increasing the number of tunable
hyper-parameters as well as the training time. Nonetheless, the sample
complexity of the distance metrics remains one of the factors affecting GAN
training. We first show that the recently proposed sliced Wasserstein distance
has compelling sample complexity properties when compared to the Wasserstein
distance. To further improve the sliced Wasserstein distance we then analyze
its `projection complexity' and develop the max-sliced Wasserstein distance
which enjoys compelling sample complexity while reducing projection complexity,
albeit necessitating a max estimation. We finally illustrate that the proposed
distance trains GANs on high-dimensional images up to a resolution of 256x256
easily.
