hindupuravinash/the-gan-zoo

Analysis updated 2026-06-24 · repo last pushed 2023-10-06

★ 14,696PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 1/5DormantSetup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((the-gan-zoo))
    Inputs
      GAN name
      Year of paper
    Outputs
      Paper link
      Code link
      TSV dataset
    Use Cases
      Literature scan
      Survey writing
      Finding prior art
      Naming new variants
    Tech Stack
      Markdown
      TSV

mindmap root((the-gan-zoo)) Inputs GAN name Year of paper Outputs Paper link Code link TSV dataset Use Cases Literature scan Survey writing Finding prior art Naming new variants Tech Stack Markdown TSV

Click or tap to explore — scroll the page freely

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Look up an unfamiliar GAN acronym and jump straight to its paper

USE CASE 2

Filter gans.tsv by year to map the growth of GAN research over time

USE CASE 3

Find prior art for a new GAN variant before naming it

USE CASE 4

Pull a reading list of GAN papers for a survey or thesis chapter

What is it built with?

MarkdownTSV

How does it compare?

	hindupuravinash/the-gan-zoo	horovod/horovod	scipy/scipy
Stars	14,696	14,688	14,686
Language	Python	Python	Python
Last pushed	2023-10-06	2025-12-01	—
Maintenance	Dormant	Quiet	—
Setup difficulty	easy	hard	easy
Complexity	1/5	5/5	4/5
Audience	researcher	researcher	researcher

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

The list has not been kept up to date with the most recent GAN papers, so treat it as a historical snapshot.

In plain English

the-gan-zoo is a long, hand-curated list of named GANs. A GAN, short for generative adversarial network, is a kind of machine learning model where two neural networks compete: one tries to generate fake data that looks real, and the other tries to tell real data from fake. GANs are used to produce images, video, audio, and other content. New variations of the basic idea show up in research papers all the time, and researchers tend to give each variant a clever name. The README opens with a casual note from the author about how hard it is to keep up with the flood of new GAN papers, especially given the creative names. The repository started as a fun exercise to track them all. The header image is a play on a zoo poster, and there is a chart of the cumulative number of named GANs over time included in the repo. The core content is a flat list, alphabetised by name, of every GAN the author has come across. Each entry has the short name, the title of the paper, and a link to the paper, usually on arXiv. When code is available, a link to the GitHub repository is included as well. Names range from 3D-GAN for object shape generation, to AC-GAN for conditional image synthesis, to AnoGAN for anomaly detection, to AttnGAN for text-to-image generation. The list keeps going through hundreds of entries. The same data is also available in a tab-separated file called gans.tsv inside the repository, which the README points to as an alternative way to filter by year or search by title. The author welcomes contributions, asking people to either open a pull request against gans.tsv or file an issue if they spot a missing paper. For a non-technical reader, the repository is a research index, not a piece of software. You cannot run anything from it directly. Its value is as a reference: if you hear about a paper, or want to find existing work on a particular GAN application, you can scan this list to see which papers are out there and where to read them. The README also points to the author's weekly AI newsletter and Twitter for related coverage. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Parse gans.tsv from the-gan-zoo and group GAN papers by year as a chart

Prompt 2

From the-gan-zoo find every GAN focused on text to image generation and list their papers

Prompt 3

Make a 10 paper reading list from the-gan-zoo aimed at a beginner who knows basic deep learning

Prompt 4

Cross reference the-gan-zoo with arXiv to find which entries have code repos linked

Frequently asked questions

What is the-gan-zoo?

Curated index of named GAN papers, alphabetised by acronym, with links to the original papers and to code where available. Same data exposed as a tab-separated file for filtering.

What language is the-gan-zoo written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Markdown, TSV.

Is the-gan-zoo actively maintained?

Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2023-10-06).

How hard is the-gan-zoo to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is the-gan-zoo for?

Mainly researcher.

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