Only awesome is awesome. This is a curation, not a collection.

This list is about what GANs are used for. General GAN papers whose contribution is the model itself (DCGAN, BEGAN, WGAN, …) are not included as entries — only genuine landmarks make the short list at the top. Pure theory / loss-function papers are out of scope; diffusion-only work is out of scope (GAN+diffusion hybrids are fine).

🏷 Legend: 📄 paper · 💻 code · 🌐 project/demo · 🎬 video · 📝 blog

🤝 Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

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🏛 The landmark papers that I respect

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Generative Adversarial Networks	NeurIPS	2014	📄 💻
Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional GANs (DCGAN)	ICLR	2016	📄 💻
Improved Techniques for Training GANs	NeurIPS	2016	📄 💻
BEGAN: Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Networks	—	2017	📄 💻
Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data (StyleGAN2-ADA)	NeurIPS	2020	📄 💻
The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline (R3GAN)	NeurIPS	2024	📄 💻

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Contents

Click to expand the table of contents — or just press command/ctrl + F to search for a keyword.

• Applications using GANs
  • 🔤 Font generation
  • 🎴 Anime character generation
  • 🎭 Face Stylization
  • 🎮 Interactive Image generation
  • 🔧 GAN Inversion and Latent Space Editing
  • ✍ Text2Image (text to image)
  • ⚡ Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (GAN-hybrid)
  • 🧊 3D Object generation
  • 🌐 3D-aware Image Synthesis
  • ✏ Image Editing
  • 👴 Face Aging
  • 🕺 Human Pose Estimation
  • 🗣 Talking Head and Face Reenactment
  • 👗 Virtual Try-On
  • 🔄 Domain-transfer (e.g. style-transfer, pix2pix, sketch2image)
  • 🩹 Image Inpainting (hole filling)
  • 🪄 Image Blending
  • 🔍 Super-resolution
  • 🖼 High-resolution image generation (large-scale image)
  • 🛡 Adversarial Examples (Defense vs Attack)
  • 👁 Visual Saliency Prediction (attention prediction)
  • 🎯 Object Detection/Recognition
  • 🎬 Video (generation/prediction)
  • 🔊 Audio and Speech Synthesis
  • 🔡 Text and Sequence Generation
  • 🚨 Anomaly Detection
  • 🧪 Synthetic Data Generation
  • 🧩 Others
• Did not use GAN, but still interesting applications
  • 🧑 Real-time face reconstruction
  • 🔍 Super-resolution
  • 🖼 Photorealistic Image generation (e.g. pix2pix, sketch2image)
  • 🕺 Human Pose Estimation
  • 🧊 3D Object generation
• 📚 GAN tutorials with easy and simple example code for starters
• 🛠 Awesome GAN GitHub Projects and Tools
• 🧰 Implementations of various types of GANs collection
• 📰 Trendy AI-application Articles

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Applications using GANs

🔤 Font generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Learning Chinese Character Style with Conditional GAN (zi2zi)	—	2017	💻 📝
Artistic Glyph Image Synthesis via One-Stage Few-Shot Learning (AGIS-Net)	SIGGRAPH Asia	2019	📄 💻
Attribute2Font: Creating Fonts You Want From Attributes	SIGGRAPH	2020	📄 💻

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🎴 Anime character generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with GANs	—	2017	📄
AnimeGANv2: Photo to Anime Style Transfer	—	2021	💻

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🎭 Face Stylization

Title	Venue	Year	Links
JoJoGAN: One Shot Face Stylization	ECCV	2022	📄 💻

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🎮 Interactive Image generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold (iGAN)	ECCV	2016	📄 💻
Neural Photo Editing with Introspective Adversarial Networks	ICLR	2017	📄 💻
Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold (DragGAN)	SIGGRAPH	2023	📄 💻

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🔧 GAN Inversion and Latent Space Editing

Title	Venue	Year	Links
StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery	ICCV	2021	📄 💻
Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation (pSp)	CVPR	2021	📄 💻

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✍ Text2Image (text to image)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
TAC-GAN: Text Conditioned Auxiliary Classifier GAN	—	2017	📄 💻
StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked GANs	ICCV	2017	📄 💻
Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis	ICML	2016	📄 💻 💻
Learning What and Where to Draw	NeurIPS	2016	📄 💻
AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional GANs	CVPR	2018	📄 💻
GigaGAN: Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis	CVPR	2023	📄
StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis	ICML	2023	📄 💻

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⚡ Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (GAN-hybrid)

GANs strike back in 2024–2026: adversarial objectives distill slow diffusion samplers into one/few-step image and video generators — where GANs are most alive in 2025–2026.

Title	Venue	Year	Links
UFOGen: You Forward Once Large Scale Text-to-Image Generation via Diffusion GANs	CVPR	2024	📄
Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis (DMD2)	NeurIPS	2024	📄 💻
SANA-Sprint: One-Step Diffusion with Continuous-Time Consistency Distillation	arXiv	2025	📄 💻
Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generation (Seaweed-APT)	ICML	2025	📄 🌐
Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation (Seaweed-APT2)	NeurIPS	2025	📄 🌐

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🧊 3D Object generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Parametric 3D Exploration with Stacked Adversarial Networks (pix2vox)	—	2016	💻 🎬
Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling (3D-GAN)	NeurIPS	2016	📄 💻 🎬
3D Shape Induction from 2D Views of Multiple Objects	—	2016	📄
Fully Convolutional Refined Auto-Encoding GANs for 3D Multi Object Scenes	—	2017	💻 📝

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🌐 3D-aware Image Synthesis

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks (EG3D)	CVPR	2022	📄 💻

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✏ Image Editing

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Invertible Conditional GANs for Image Editing (IcGAN)	—	2016	📄 💻
Image De-raining Using a Conditional GAN (ID-CGAN)	—	2017	📄 💻
DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks	CVPR	2018	📄 💻

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👴 Face Aging

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder (CAAE)	CVPR	2017	📄 💻
CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks Generating "Art"	—	2017	📄
Face Aging with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks	—	2017	📄

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🕺 Human Pose Estimation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Joint Discriminative and Generative Learning for Person Re-identification (DG-Net)	CVPR	2019	📄 💻 🎬
Pose Guided Person Image Generation	NeurIPS	2017	📄

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🗣 Talking Head and Face Reenactment

Title	Venue	Year	Links
First Order Motion Model for Image Animation	NeurIPS	2019	📄 💻
A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In the Wild (Wav2Lip)	ACM MM	2020	📄 💻

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👗 Virtual Try-On

Title	Venue	Year	Links
VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalization	CVPR	2021	📄 💻

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🔄 Domain-transfer (e.g. style-transfer, pix2pix, sketch2image)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks (pix2pix)	CVPR	2017	📄 💻 🎬
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN)	ICCV	2017	📄 💻 🎬
Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with GANs (DiscoGAN)	ICML	2017	📄 💻
StarGAN: Unified Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation	CVPR	2018	📄 💻
StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains	CVPR	2020	📄 💻
Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation (MUNIT)	ECCV	2018	📄 💻
Unsupervised Creation of Parameterized Avatars	—	2017	📄
Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation (DTN)	ICLR	2017	📄
Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian GANs (MGANs)	ECCV	2016	📄 💻
Pixel-Level Domain Transfer (PixelDTGAN)	ECCV	2016	📄 💻
TextureGAN: Controlling Deep Image Synthesis with Texture Patches	CVPR	2018	📄 🌐
Vincent AI Sketch Demo (NVIDIA, GTC Europe)	—	2017	📝 🎬
Deep Photo Style Transfer	CVPR	2017	📄 💻

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🩹 Image Inpainting (hole filling)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting	CVPR	2016	📄 💻
Semantic Image Inpainting with Perceptual and Contextual Losses	CVPR	2017	📄 💻
Semi-Supervised Learning with Context-Conditional GANs	—	2016	📄
Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution (DeepFill v2)	ICCV	2019	📄 💻
Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions (LaMa)	WACV	2022	📄 💻

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🪄 Image Blending

Title	Venue	Year	Links
GP-GAN: Towards Realistic High-Resolution Image Blending	ACM MM	2019	📄 💻

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🔍 Super-resolution

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Image Super-Resolution Through Deep Learning (srez)	—	2016	💻
Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a GAN (SRGAN)	CVPR	2017	📄 💻
High-Quality Face Image Super-Resolution Using Conditional GANs	—	2017	📄
Analyzing Perception-Distortion Tradeoff (EPSR)	ECCVW	2018	📄 💻
ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks	ECCVW	2018	📄 💻
Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data	ICCVW	2021	📄 💻

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🖼 High-resolution image generation (large-scale image)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Generating Large Images from Latent Vectors	—	2016	💻 📝
Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation (PGGAN)	ICLR	2018	📄 💻
Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis (BigGAN)	ICLR	2019	📄
SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image	ICCV	2019	📄 💻
Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN (StyleGAN2)	CVPR	2020	📄 💻
Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGAN3)	NeurIPS	2021	📄 💻

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🛡 Adversarial Examples (Defense vs Attack)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
SafetyNet: Detecting and Rejecting Adversarial Examples Robustly	ICCV	2017	📄
Adversarial Examples for Generative Models	—	2017	📄

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👁 Visual Saliency Prediction (attention prediction)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
SalGAN: Visual Saliency Prediction with Generative Adversarial Networks	—	2017	📄 💻

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🎯 Object Detection/Recognition

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection	CVPR	2017	📄
Adversarial Generation of Training Examples for Vehicle License Plate Recognition	—	2017	📄

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🎬 Video (generation/prediction)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Deep Multi-Scale Video Prediction Beyond Mean Square Error	ICLR	2016	📄 💻
Learning Temporal Coherence via Self-Supervision for GAN-based Video Generation (TecoGAN)	SIGGRAPH	2020	📄 💻

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🔊 Audio and Speech Synthesis

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Adversarial Audio Synthesis (WaveGAN)	ICLR	2019	📄 💻
HiFi-GAN: GANs for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis	NeurIPS	2020	📄 💻
BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training (v2 2024)	ICLR	2023	📄 💻
Vocos: Closing the Gap between Time-domain and Fourier-based Neural Vocoders	ICLR	2024	📄 💻
BemaGANv2: Discriminator Combination Strategies for GAN-based Vocoders in Long-Term Audio	arXiv	2025	📄 💻

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🔡 Text and Sequence Generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient	AAAI	2017	📄 💻

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🚨 Anomaly Detection

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with GANs to Guide Marker Discovery (AnoGAN)	IPMI	2017	📄

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🧪 Synthetic Data Generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training (SimGAN)	CVPR	2017	📄 💻

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🧩 Others

Title	Venue	Year	Links
(Physics) Location-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks for Physics Synthesis	—	2017	📄 💻
(General) Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks	ICLR	2018	📄 💻

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Did not use GAN, but still interesting applications.

🧑 Real-time face reconstruction

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Model-based Deep Convolutional Face Autoencoder for Unsupervised Monocular Reconstruction (MoFA)	ICCV	2017	📄 💻 🎬

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🔍 Super-resolution

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Learning to Simplify: Fully Convolutional Networks for Rough Sketch Cleanup	SIGGRAPH	2016	🌐 🎬

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🖼 Photorealistic Image generation (e.g. pix2pix, sketch2image)

Title	Venue	Year	Links
The Sketchy Database: Learning to Retrieve Badly Drawn Bunnies	SIGGRAPH	2016	🎬
PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing	SIGGRAPH	2009	📄 💻 🎬

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🕺 Human Pose Estimation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
Knowledge-Guided Deep Fractal Neural Networks for Human Pose Estimation	—	2017	📄 💻

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🧊 3D Object generation

Title	Venue	Year	Links
3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction	ECCV	2016	📄 💻

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📚 GAN tutorials with easy and simple example code for starters

• 1D Generative Adversarial Network Demo
• starter from "How to Train a GAN?" at NIPS2016
• NIPS 2016 Tutorial: Generative Adversarial Networks
• OpenAI - Generative Models

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🛠 Awesome GAN GitHub Projects and Tools

Genuinely awesome, widely-used GitHub repos built on GANs — usable code and tools, not just papers. Star counts update automatically.

Real-world applications and tools

Repo	Stars	What it does
TencentARC/GFPGAN		Practical real-world face restoration
jantic/DeOldify		Colorize and restore old photos and video (archived)

Foundational model code (official / canonical)

Repo	Stars	What it does
junyanz/pytorch-CycleGAN-and-pix2pix		Official CycleGAN + pix2pix in PyTorch
NVlabs/stylegan		Official StyleGAN
NVlabs/SPADE		Semantic image synthesis, a.k.a. GauGAN
NVIDIA/pix2pixHD		High-resolution image synthesis and manipulation
ajbrock/BigGAN-PyTorch		The author's PyTorch BigGAN

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🧰 Implementations of various types of GANs collection

Repo	Stars	Framework
nashory/gans-collection.torch		Torch7
hwalsuklee/tensorflow-generative-model-collections		TensorFlow
wiseodd/generative-models		PyTorch & TensorFlow
aboev/arae-tf		TensorFlow
eriklindernoren/PyTorch-GAN		PyTorch — dozens of GANs
eriklindernoren/Keras-GAN		Keras — many GANs
NVlabs/imaginaire		PyTorch — NVIDIA image & video synthesis GANs

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📰 Trendy AI-application Articles

• Artificial intelligence can say yes to the dress

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Author

Minchul Shin, @nashory

Any recommendations to add to the list are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and feel free to make pull requests! :)