RareGAN: Generating Samples for Rare Classes
This addresses a practical challenge in domains like security, systems, and machine learning where rare class data is scarce, offering an incremental improvement over existing GAN-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of generating high-quality samples for rare classes in unlabeled datasets with limited labeling budgets, and shows that RareGAN achieves a better fidelity-diversity tradeoff for the rare class compared to prior methods across various applications and conditions.
We study the problem of learning generative adversarial networks (GANs) for a rare class of an unlabeled dataset subject to a labeling budget. This problem is motivated from practical applications in domains including security (e.g., synthesizing packets for DNS amplification attacks), systems and networking (e.g., synthesizing workloads that trigger high resource usage), and machine learning (e.g., generating images from a rare class). Existing approaches are unsuitable, either requiring fully-labeled datasets or sacrificing the fidelity of the rare class for that of the common classes. We propose RareGAN, a novel synthesis of three key ideas: (1) extending conditional GANs to use labelled and unlabelled data for better generalization; (2) an active learning approach that requests the most useful labels; and (3) a weighted loss function to favor learning the rare class. We show that RareGAN achieves a better fidelity-diversity tradeoff on the rare class than prior work across different applications, budgets, rare class fractions, GAN losses, and architectures.