OpenAI：generative-models blogs

Three approaches to generative models
Most generative models have this basic setup, but differ in the details. Here are three popular examples of generative model approaches to give you a sense of the variation:
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which we already discussed above, pose the training process as a game between two separate networks: a generator network (as seen above) and a second discriminative network that tries to classify samples as either coming from the true distribution $p(x)$or the model distribution$p'(x)$. Every time the discriminator notices a difference between the two distributions the generator adjusts its parameters slightly to make it go away, until at the end (in theory) the generator exactly reproduces the true data distribution and the discriminator is guessing at random, unable to find a difference.
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) allow us to formalize this problem in the framework of probabilistic graphical models where we are maximizing a lower bound on the log likelihood of the data.
Autoregressive models such as PixelRNN instead train a network that models the conditional distribution of every individual pixel given previous pixels (to the left and to the top). This is similar to plugging the pixels of the image into a char-rnn, but the RNNs run both horizontally and vertically over the image instead of just a 1D sequence of characters.
All of these approaches have their pros and cons. For example, Variational Autoencoders allow us to perform both learning and efficient Bayesian inference in sophisticated probabilistic graphical models with latent variables (e.g. see DRAW, or Attend Infer Repeat for hints of recent relatively complex models). However, their generated samples tend to be slightly blurry. GANs currently generate the sharpest images but they are more difficult to optimize due to unstable training dynamics. PixelRNNs have a very simple and stable training process (softmax loss) and currently give the best log likelihoods (that is, plausibility of the generated data). However, they are relatively inefficient during sampling and don’t easily provide simple low-dimensional codes for images. All of these models are active areas of research and we are eager to see how they develop in the future!

OpenAI generative models blog