Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are popular and successful generative models. Despite their success, optimization is notoriously challenging and they require regularization against overfitting. In this work, we explain the success and limitations of GANs by interpreting them as probabilistic generative models. This interpretation enables us to view GANs as Bayesian neural networks with partial stochasticity, allowing us to establish conditions of universal approximation. We can then cast the adversarial-style optimization of several variants of GANs as the optimization of a proxy for the marginal likelihood. Taking advantage of the connection between marginal likelihood optimization and Occam's razor, we can define regularization and optimization strategies to smooth the loss landscape and search for solutions with minimum description length, which are associated with flat minima and good generalization. The results on a wide range of experiments indicate that these strategies lead to performance improvements and pave the way to a deeper understanding of regularization strategies for GANs.
View on arXiv@article{filippone2025_2507.00651,
title={ GANs Secretly Perform Approximate Bayesian Model Selection },
author={ Maurizio Filippone and Marius P. Linhard },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.00651},
year={ 2025 }
}