In plain words: The Inception Score judges generated images by running them through a classifier, rewarding images that look like one thing and sets covering many things. This note finds it can mislead when ranking models, because of flaws in the score and how it is used.
Abstract
Deep generative models are powerful tools that have produced impressive results in recent years. These advances have been for the most part empirically driven, making it essential that we use high quality evaluation metrics. In this paper, we provide new insights into the Inception Score, a recently proposed and widely used evaluation metric for generative models, and demonstrate that it fails to provide useful guidance when comparing models. We discuss both suboptimalities of the metric itself and issues with its application. Finally, we call for researchers to be more systematic and careful when evaluating and comparing generative models, as the advancement of the field depends upon it.
Shane Barratt, Rishi Sharma
arXiv:1801.01973 · stat.ML, cs.LG · submitted Jan 6, 2018 · updated Jun 21, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Proc. ICML 2018 Workshop on Theoretical Foundations and Applications of Deep Generative Models