Okay thanks for the reply! I am still struggling a bit with what defining w buys you if you have to sample in z. But I'll reread the paper before asking any more specific questions, it seems related to VEEGAN's autoencoder formulation on z-space (as you note in the paper, but I've got to think a bit more..)

I understand that the gradient penalty is only imposed on the discriminator but it seems to me it has an indirect influence on the generator due to the L2 w loss. This is not a bad thing, I think it must help the interpolation quality.

(I did read it in full by the way.. I was just being colloquial with the "skip to.." language.. I do happen to think the abstract could be more descriptive.)