Towards Geographic Inclusion in the Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models

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Main Authors: Hall, Melissa, Bell, Samuel J., Ross, Candace, Williams, Adina, Drozdzal, Michal, Soriano, Adriana Romero
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Hall, Melissa
Bell, Samuel J.
Ross, Candace
Williams, Adina
Drozdzal, Michal
Soriano, Adriana Romero
author_facet Hall, Melissa
Bell, Samuel J.
Ross, Candace
Williams, Adina
Drozdzal, Michal
Soriano, Adriana Romero
contents Rapid progress in text-to-image generative models coupled with their deployment for visual content creation has magnified the importance of thoroughly evaluating their performance and identifying potential biases. In pursuit of models that generate images that are realistic, diverse, visually appealing, and consistent with the given prompt, researchers and practitioners often turn to automated metrics to facilitate scalable and cost-effective performance profiling. However, commonly-used metrics often fail to account for the full diversity of human preference; often even in-depth human evaluations face challenges with subjectivity, especially as interpretations of evaluation criteria vary across regions and cultures. In this work, we conduct a large, cross-cultural study to study how much annotators in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia vary in their perception of geographic representation, visual appeal, and consistency in real and generated images from state-of-the art public APIs. We collect over 65,000 image annotations and 20 survey responses. We contrast human annotations with common automated metrics, finding that human preferences vary notably across geographic location and that current metrics do not fully account for this diversity. For example, annotators in different locations often disagree on whether exaggerated, stereotypical depictions of a region are considered geographically representative. In addition, the utility of automatic evaluations is dependent on assumptions about their set-up, such as the alignment of feature extractors with human perception of object similarity or the definition of "appeal" captured in reference datasets used to ground evaluations. We recommend steps for improved automatic and human evaluations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_04457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Geographic Inclusion in the Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models
Hall, Melissa
Bell, Samuel J.
Ross, Candace
Williams, Adina
Drozdzal, Michal
Soriano, Adriana Romero
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Rapid progress in text-to-image generative models coupled with their deployment for visual content creation has magnified the importance of thoroughly evaluating their performance and identifying potential biases. In pursuit of models that generate images that are realistic, diverse, visually appealing, and consistent with the given prompt, researchers and practitioners often turn to automated metrics to facilitate scalable and cost-effective performance profiling. However, commonly-used metrics often fail to account for the full diversity of human preference; often even in-depth human evaluations face challenges with subjectivity, especially as interpretations of evaluation criteria vary across regions and cultures. In this work, we conduct a large, cross-cultural study to study how much annotators in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia vary in their perception of geographic representation, visual appeal, and consistency in real and generated images from state-of-the art public APIs. We collect over 65,000 image annotations and 20 survey responses. We contrast human annotations with common automated metrics, finding that human preferences vary notably across geographic location and that current metrics do not fully account for this diversity. For example, annotators in different locations often disagree on whether exaggerated, stereotypical depictions of a region are considered geographically representative. In addition, the utility of automatic evaluations is dependent on assumptions about their set-up, such as the alignment of feature extractors with human perception of object similarity or the definition of "appeal" captured in reference datasets used to ground evaluations. We recommend steps for improved automatic and human evaluations.
title Towards Geographic Inclusion in the Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04457