PaDGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Performance Augmented Diverse Designs

Abstract

Deep generative models are proven to be a useful tool for automatic design synthesis and design space exploration. When applied in engineering design, existing generative models face two challenges: 1) generated designs lack diversity and do not cover all areas of the design space and 2) it is difficult to explicitly improve the overall performance or quality of generated designs without excluding low-quality designs from the dataset, which may impair the performance of the trained model due to reduced training sample size. In this paper, we simultaneously address these challenges by proposing a new Determinantal Point Processes based loss function for probabilistic modeling of diversity and quality. With this new loss function, we develop a variant of the Generative Adversarial Network, named "Performance Augmented Diverse Generative Adversarial Network" or PaDGAN, which can generate novel high-quality designs with good coverage of the design space. We demonstrate that PaDGAN can generate diverse and high-quality designs on both synthetic and real-world examples and compare PaDGAN against other models such as the vanilla GAN and the BézierGAN. Unlike typical generative models that usually generate new designs by interpolating within the boundary of training data, we show that PaDGAN expands the design space boundary towards high-quality regions. The proposed method is broadly applicable to many tasks including design space exploration, design optimization, and creative solution recommendation.