nashory/gans-awesome-applications

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

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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

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🎴 Anime character generation

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🎭 Face Stylization

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🎮 Interactive Image generation

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🔧 GAN Inversion and Latent Space Editing

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✍ Text2Image (text to image)

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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.

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🧊 3D Object generation

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🌐 3D-aware Image Synthesis

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✏ Image Editing

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👴 Face Aging

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🕺 Human Pose Estimation

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🗣 Talking Head and Face Reenactment

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👗 Virtual Try-On

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

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🩹 Image Inpainting (hole filling)

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🪄 Image Blending

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🔍 Super-resolution

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

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🛡 Adversarial Examples (Defense vs Attack)

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👁 Visual Saliency Prediction (attention prediction)

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🎯 Object Detection/Recognition

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🎬 Video (generation/prediction)

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🔊 Audio and Speech Synthesis

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🔡 Text and Sequence Generation

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🚨 Anomaly Detection

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🧪 Synthetic Data Generation

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🧩 Others

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Did not use GAN, but still interesting applications.

🧑 Real-time face reconstruction

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🔍 Super-resolution

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

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🕺 Human Pose Estimation

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🧊 3D Object generation

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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

Foundational model code (official / canonical)

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🧰 Implementations of various types of GANs collection

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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! :)