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By DCGAN
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Overview
DCGAN is a convolutional GAN architecture that stabilizes training and improves image quality. It replaces fully connected layers with strided and fractionally strided convolutions, uses batch normalization and simple activation rules, and became a standard baseline for unsupervised image synthesis and feature learning.
Description
DCGAN (Radford, Metz, Chintala) showed that carefully constrained convolutional designs make GANs both stable and expressive. The generator maps a latent vector to an image using fractionally strided convolutions, ReLU inside and tanh at the output, no dense layers. The discriminator mirrors this with strided convolutions, LeakyReLU activations, and no pooling, while batch normalization is applied across most layers to control covariate shift. With these choices and Adam optimization, the model learns hierarchical features, produces sharper textures than earlier GANs, and yields internal representations that transfer well to tasks like classification or object discovery. DCGAN set a practical recipe for image synthesis, inpainting, and unsupervised representation learning, and it influenced many later models that pushed GAN fidelity and stability even further.
About DCGAN
Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks
Website:
dcgan
Last updated: October 15, 2025
