Despite the tremendous progress in the estimation of generative models, the development of tools for diagnosing their failures and assessing their performance has advanced at a much slower pace. Recent developments have investigated metrics that quantify which parts of the true distribution are modeled well, and, on the contrary, what the model fails to capture, akin to precision and recall in information retrieval. In this paper, we present a general evaluation framework for generative models that measures the trade-off between precision and recall using Renyi divergences. Our framework provides a novel perspective on existing techniques and extends them to more general domains. As a key advantage, it allows for efficient algorithms that are directly applicable to continuous distributions directly without discretization. We further showcase the proposed techniques on a set of image synthesis models.
@cite_5: Recent advances in generative modeling have led to an increased interest in the study of statistical divergences as means of model comparison. Commonly used evaluation methods such as Frechet Inception Distance (FID) correlate well with the perceived quality of samples and they also show sensitivity to dropping modes from the target distribution. However, these metrics are unable to distinguish different failure cases since they inherently only yield one-dimensional scores. We propose a novel definition of precision and recall for distributions which disentangles the divergence into two separate dimensions. The proposed notion is intuitive, retains desirable properties, and naturally leads to an efficient algorithm that can be used to evaluate generative models. We relate this notion to total variation as well as to recent evaluation metrics such as Inception Score and FID. To demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed approach, we perform an empirical study on several variants of Generative Adversarial Networks and the Variational Autoencoder. In an extensive set of experiments, we show that the proposed metric is able to disentangle the quality of samples from the coverage of the target distribution.
@cite_3: The ability to evaluate the performance of a computational model is a vital requirement for driving algorithm research. This is often particularly difficult for generative models such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) that model a data manifold only specified indirectly by a finite set of training examples. In the common case of image data, the samples live in a high-dimensional embedding space with little structure to help assessing either the overall quality of samples or the coverage of the underlying manifold. We present an evaluation metric with the ability to separately and reliably measure both of these aspects in image generation tasks by forming explicit non-parametric representations of the manifolds of real and generated data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our metric in StyleGAN and BigGAN by providing several illustrative examples where existing metrics yield uninformative or contradictory results. Furthermore, we analyze multiple design variants of StyleGAN to better understand the relationships between the model architecture, training methods, and the properties of the resulting sample distribution. In the process, we identify new variants that improve the state-of-the-art. We also perform the first principled analysis of truncation methods and identify an improved method. Finally, we extend our metric to estimate the perceptual quality of individual samples, and use this to study latent space interpolations.
Exact geometric characterization of @cite_5 . @math which lie on the geodesic between @math and @math , shown as the red curve. Figure (b) shows a case where the metric defined by @cite_3 results in essentially perfect precision and recall. Arguably, in this case the precision and recall should both be low. We will now show that the two most prominent definitions of precision and recall are special cases of the presented framework.