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A note on the evaluation of generative models

17 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

17 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Probabilistic generative models can be used for compression, denoising, inpainting, texture synthesis, semi-supervised learning, unsupervised feature learning, and other tasks. Given this wide range of applications, it is not surprising that a lot of heterogeneity exists in the way these models are formulated, trained, and evaluated. As a consequence, direct comparison between models is often difficult. This article reviews mostly known but often underappreciated properties relating to the evaluation and interpretation of generative models with a focus on image models. In particular, we show that three of the currently most commonly used criteria---average log-likelihood, Parzen window estimates, and visual fidelity of samples---are largely independent of each other when the data is high-dimensional. Good performance with respect to one criterion therefore need not imply good performance with respect to the other criteria. Our results show that extrapolation from one criterion to another is not warranted and generative models need to be evaluated directly with respect to the application(s) they were intended for. In addition, we provide examples demonstrating that Parzen window estimates should generally be avoided.

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representative citing papers

Density estimation using Real NVP

cs.LG · 2016-05-27 · accept · novelty 8.0

Real NVP uses affine coupling layers to create invertible transformations that support exact density estimation, sampling, and latent inference without approximations.

Demystifying MMD GANs

stat.ML · 2018-01-04 · accept · novelty 6.0

MMD GANs have unbiased critic gradients but biased generator gradients from sample-based learning, and the Kernel Inception Distance provides a practical new measure for GAN convergence and dynamic learning rate adaptation.

Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation

cs.LG · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Coupling Models enable single-step discrete sequence generation via learned couplings to Gaussian latents and outperform prior one-step baselines on text perplexity, biological FBD, and image FID metrics.

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Showing 17 of 17 citing papers.