Inception Score: A Comprehensive Guide to GAN Metrics

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Posted Oct 29, 2024

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The Inception Score is a metric used to evaluate the quality of generated images, particularly those produced by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). It's based on the idea that a good image should be recognizable as a real image when viewed at different scales.

The Inception Score is calculated by taking the average of the scores assigned to each image by a pre-trained Inception network, which is a type of neural network that's good at recognizing objects. This score is then used to determine how well the generated image matches the real thing.

A higher Inception Score indicates that the generated image is more likely to be confused with a real image by the Inception network. This is a good thing, as it means the image is more realistic and less likely to be detected as fake.

Broaden your view: Inception Film Score

What is Inception Score

The Inception Score is a metric used to evaluate the quality of generative adversarial networks (GANs). It's a way to measure how well a GAN can generate images that are both realistic and diverse.

Credit: youtube.com, What is an Inception Score (IS) in AI Art?

The Inception Score is calculated using a specific formula that involves the KL divergence (DKL) between two probability distributions. The formula is IS(G) = exp (Ex∼pg DKL (p(y|x) || p(y) ) ). This formula is the foundation of the Inception Score, and it's used to calculate the final score.

The Inception Score is a measure of how well a GAN can generate images that are both realistic and diverse. It's a way to evaluate the quality of a GAN's output, and it's commonly used in the field of computer vision.

Definition

The Inception Score is a measure of how well a computer-generated image can be distinguished from real images. It's a way to evaluate the quality of generated images by comparing them to real images.

The Inception Score is calculated using a formula that involves the KL divergence, which measures the difference between two probability distributions. This formula is used to compare the probability distribution of labels given an image, with the probability distribution of labels in the entire dataset.

Credit: youtube.com, Inception Score for Evaluating Generative Models

To calculate the Inception Score, we need two spaces: the space of images and the space of labels. The space of labels is finite, meaning it has a limited number of possible values.

The probability distribution over images is denoted as pgen, and the discriminator is a function that takes an image and returns a probability distribution over labels. This function is typically implemented as an Inception-v3 network trained on ImageNet.

Here's a breakdown of the components involved in calculating the Inception Score:

  • pgen: the probability distribution over images
  • pdis: the discriminator function
  • ΩΩX: the space of images
  • ΩΩY: the space of labels
  • pdis(⋅⋅|x): the probability distribution over labels given an image x

Abstract

The Inception Score is a quality assessment metric for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). It's a well-known approach for evaluating GANs, but it was originally focused on images generating neural networks.

There's no unified and universal metric to compare and evaluate GANs. The Inception Score was modified to make it applicable to arbitrary GANs operating with various data sets.

The modification of the Inception Score calculation formulas allows it to be used for assessing and comparing arbitrary GANs. This makes it a valuable tool for evaluating the quality of GANs in different contexts.

The modified Inception Score was tested during experiments on objects generation from marked (MNIST) and unmarked (Human Activity Recognition Using Smartphones and Epileptic Seizure Recognition) datasets.

Calculating the Score

Credit: youtube.com, Frechet Inception Distance and Inception Score - AI Bits and Pieces

The inception score is calculated using a specific formula, which involves several key components.

IS(G) = exp (Ex∼pg DKL (p(y|x) || p(y) ) )

The major components of the formula are the final inception score (IS), the KL divergence (DKL), the conditional probability distribution (p(y|x)), the marginal probability distribution (p(y)), and the sum and average of all results (Ex~pg).

To resolve this expression and determine the final inception score, follow these five basic steps:

  1. Process the AI-generated images through the image classification network to obtain the conditional probability distribution or p(y|x).
  2. Calculate the marginal probability distribution or p(y).
  3. Calculate the KL divergence (between p(y) and p(y|x)).
  4. Calculate the sum for classes and calculate an average score for all images.
  5. Calculate the average value of all results (Ex~pg) and take its exponent (exp).

By following these steps, you can calculate the inception score for a given set of computer-generated images.

How it Works

The inception score is based on Google's "Inception" image classification network, a pre-trained model that can predict class probabilities for each image.

This model returns a probability distribution, which is a numbered list of what the image might be, with each option having a fractional score that adds up to 1.0.

To calculate the inception score, you'll need to prepare your images in a specific format, using torch.Tensor with shape [N, 3, H, W] and normalized to [0,1].

Fréchet Distance

Credit: youtube.com, Frechet Inception Distance @GAN

Fréchet Distance is a metric used to evaluate the quality of AI-generated images. Introduced in 2017, it has generally superseded Inception Score as the preferred measure of generative image model performance.

FID analyzes real images alongside computer-generated images to better simulate human perception. This is a key difference from Inception Score, which only evaluates computer-generated images.

FID has been shown to demonstrate some statistical bias, and does not always accurately reflect human perception. Despite this, it remains a widely used metric in the field of AI-generated images.

The Fréchet Inception Distance formula is complex and requires the use of calculus, making it beyond the scope of this definition.

How it Works

The inception score is based on Google's "Inception" image classification network, a pre-trained model that can predict class probabilities for each image.

To calculate an inception score, you start by using the image classification network to ingest a generated image and return a probability distribution for the image. This distribution is a numbered list of what the image classification network "thinks" the image might be, with each option having a fractional score that adds up to 1.0.

The image classification network is specifically a pre-trained Inception v3 model.

Images must be prepared in a specific way to calculate the inception score: they should be in type torch.float32 with shape [N, 3, H, W] and normalized to [0,1].

Additional reading: Binary Classification

Reproducing Cifar-10 Results

Credit: youtube.com, Understanding the CIFAR 10 Dataset

Reproducing the results of official implementations on CIFAR-10 can be a bit tricky due to framework differences between PyTorch and TensorFlow.

The official implementation reports a Train IS of 11.24±0.20 and a Test IS of 10.98±0.22.

Using the pytorch-gan-metrics library, you can achieve similar results with a Train IS of 11.26±0.13 and a Test IS of 10.96±0.35.

However, if you tweak the code by setting use_torch=True and using torch==2.0.1, you can get even closer to the official results with a Train IS of 11.26±0.15 and a Test IS of 10.95±0.16.

Here's a summary of the results:

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a lower Inception Score better?

A lower Inception Score indicates better image quality and model performance, with zero being the best possible score. This objective measure helps evaluate the quality and capability of generative models.

What is the Inception Score CIFAR-10?

The Inception Score is a metric evaluating the quality of generated images, measuring their diversity and quality compared to real images in the CIFAR-10 dataset. It assesses how well generated images match real images from CIFAR-10.

Keith Marchal

Senior Writer

Keith Marchal is a passionate writer who has been sharing his thoughts and experiences on his personal blog for more than a decade. He is known for his engaging storytelling style and insightful commentary on a wide range of topics, including travel, food, technology, and culture. With a keen eye for detail and a deep appreciation for the power of words, Keith's writing has captivated readers all around the world.

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