  Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are innovative techniques for learning
generative models of complex data distributions from samples. Despite
remarkable recent improvements in generating realistic images, one of their
major shortcomings is the fact that in practice, they tend to produce samples
with little diversity, even when trained on diverse datasets. This phenomenon,
known as mode collapse, has been the main focus of several recent advances in
GANs. Yet there is little understanding of why mode collapse happens and why
existing approaches are able to mitigate mode collapse. We propose a principled
approach to handling mode collapse, which we call packing. The main idea is to
modify the discriminator to make decisions based on multiple samples from the
same class, either real or artificially generated. We borrow analysis tools
from binary hypothesis testing---in particular the seminal result of Blackwell
[Bla53]---to prove a fundamental connection between packing and mode collapse.
We show that packing naturally penalizes generators with mode collapse, thereby
favoring generator distributions with less mode collapse during the training
process. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets suggests that packing
provides significant improvements in practice as well.
