Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a prominent branch of Machine learning research today. As deep neural networks require a lot of data to train on, they perform poorly if data provided is not sufficient. GANs can overcome this problem by generating new and real data, without using the tricks like data augmentation.
As the application of GANs in the Machine learning industry is still at the infancy level, it is considered a highly desirable niche skill. Having an added hands-on experience raises the bar higher in the job market. It can fetch you a higher pay over your colleagues and can also be the feature that sets your resume stand apart.
Source: Gartner’s Hype Cycle 2017
GANs along with CNNs and RNNs are a part of the in demand deep neural network experience in the industry.
Here are five reasons why you should learn GANs today and how Kuntal Ganguly’s book, Learning Generative Adversarial Networks help you do just that.
Kuntal is a big data analytics engineer at Amazon Web Services. He has around 7 years of experience building large-scale, data-driven systems using big data frameworks and machine learning. He has designed, developed, and deployed several large-scale distributed applications, without any assistance. Kuntal is a seasoned author with a rich set of books ranging across the data science spectrum from machine learning, deep learning, to Generative Adversarial Networks, published under his belt.[/author]
The book shows how to implement GANs in your machine learning models in a quick and easy format with plenty of real-world examples and hands-on tutorials.
1. Unsupervised Learning now a cakewalk with GANs
A major challenge of unsupervised learning is the massive amount of unlabelled data one needed to work through as part of data preparation. In traditional neural networks, this labeling of data is both costly and time-consuming. A creative aspect of Deep learning is now possible using Generative Adversarial Networks. Here, the neural networks are capable of generating realistic images from the real-world datasets (such as MNIST and CIFAR).
GANs provide an easy way to train the DL algorithms. This is done by slashing down the amount of data required to train the neural network models, that too, with no labeling of data required. This book uses a semi-supervised approach to solve the problem of unsupervised learning for classifying images. However, this could be easily leveraged into developer’s own problem domain.
2. GANs help you change a horse into a zebra using Image style transfer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9reHvktowLY
Turning an apple into an orange is Magic!! GANs can do this magic, without casting a spell. Transferring Image-to-Image style, where the styling of one image is applied to the other. What GANs can do is, they can perform image-to-image translations across various domains (such as changing apple to orange or horse to zebra) using Cycle Consistent Generative Network (Cycle GANs). Detailed examples of how to turn the image of an apple to an orange using TensorFlow, and how of turn an image of a horse into a zebra using a GAN model, are given in this book.
3. GANs inputs your text and outputs an image
Generative Adversarial networks can also be utilized for text-to-image synthesis. An example of this is in generating a photo-realistic image based on a caption. To do this, a dataset of images with their associated captions are given as training data. The dataset is first encoded using a hybrid neural network called the character-level convolutional Recurrent Neural network, which creates a joint representation of both in multimodal space for both the generator and the discriminator. In this book, Kuntal showcases the technique of stacking multiple generative networks to generate realistic images from textual information using StackGANs.Further, the book goes on to explain the coupling of two generative networks, to automatically discover relationships among various domains (a relationship between shoes and handbags or actor and actress) using DiscoGANs.
4. GANs + Transfer Learning = No more model generation from scratch
Source: Learning Generative Adversarial Networks
Data is the basis to train any Machine learning model, scarcity of which can lead to a poorly-trained model, which can have high chances of failure. Some real-life scenarios may not have sufficient data, hardware, or resources to train bigger networks in order to achieve the desired accuracy. So, is training from scratch a must-do for training the models? A well-known technique used in deep learning that adapts an existing trained model for a similar task to the task at hand is known as Transfer Learning. This book will showcase Transfer learning using some hands-on examples. Further, a combination of both Transfer learning and GANs, to generate high-resolution realistic images with facial datasets is explained.
Thus, you will also understand how to create creating artistic hallucination on images beyond GAN.
5. GANs help you take Machine Learning models to Production
Most Machine learning tutorials, video courses, and books, explain the training and the evaluation of the models. But how do we take this trained model to production and put it to use and make it available to customers?
In this book, the author has taken an example, i.e. developing a facial correction system using an LFW dataset, to automatically correct corrupted images using your trained GAN model. This book also contains several techniques of deploying machine learning or deep learning models in production both on data centers and clouds with micro-service based containerized environments.You will also learn the way of running deep models in a serverless environment and with managed cloud services.
This article just scratches the surface of what is possible with GANs and why learning it would change your thinking about deep neural networks. To know more grab your copy of Kuntal Ganguly’s book on GANs: Learning Generative Adversarial Networks.
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