Wasserstein GAN (WGAN)

Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) is a generative adversarial network variant introduced by Arjovsky, Chintala, and Bottou in 2017 that replaces the Jensen-Shannon divergence used in the original GAN with the Wasserstein-1 (Earth Mover) distance. This substitution provides a theoretically grounded training objective that yields more stable optimization and a loss value that correlates meaningfully with generated sample quality, addressing the notorious mode collapse and vanishing gradient problems of standard GANs.