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Main Authors: Bench, Ciaran, Desai, Vivek, Roozemond, Carlijn, van Engen, Ruben, Thomas, Spencer A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21979
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author Bench, Ciaran
Desai, Vivek
Roozemond, Carlijn
van Engen, Ruben
Thomas, Spencer A.
author_facet Bench, Ciaran
Desai, Vivek
Roozemond, Carlijn
van Engen, Ruben
Thomas, Spencer A.
contents Feature embeddings acquired from pretrained models are widely used in medical applications of deep learning to assess the characteristics of datasets; e.g. to determine the quality of synthetic, generated medical images. The Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) is one popular synthetic image quality metric that relies on the assumption that the characteristic features of the data can be detected and encoded by an InceptionV3 model pretrained on ImageNet1K (natural images). While it is widely known that this makes it less effective for applications involving medical images, the extent to which the metric fails to capture meaningful differences in image characteristics is not obviously known. Here, we use Monte Carlo dropout to compute the predictive variance in the FID as well as a supplemental estimate of the predictive variance in the feature embedding model's latent representations. We show that the magnitudes of the predictive variances considered exhibit varying degrees of correlation with the extent to which test inputs (ImageNet1K validation set augmented at various strengths, and other external datasets) are out-of-distribution relative to its training data, providing some insight into the effectiveness of their use as indicators of the trustworthiness of the FID.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21979
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigation into using stochastic embedding representations for evaluating the trustworthiness of the Fréchet Inception Distance
Bench, Ciaran
Desai, Vivek
Roozemond, Carlijn
van Engen, Ruben
Thomas, Spencer A.
Machine Learning
Feature embeddings acquired from pretrained models are widely used in medical applications of deep learning to assess the characteristics of datasets; e.g. to determine the quality of synthetic, generated medical images. The Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) is one popular synthetic image quality metric that relies on the assumption that the characteristic features of the data can be detected and encoded by an InceptionV3 model pretrained on ImageNet1K (natural images). While it is widely known that this makes it less effective for applications involving medical images, the extent to which the metric fails to capture meaningful differences in image characteristics is not obviously known. Here, we use Monte Carlo dropout to compute the predictive variance in the FID as well as a supplemental estimate of the predictive variance in the feature embedding model's latent representations. We show that the magnitudes of the predictive variances considered exhibit varying degrees of correlation with the extent to which test inputs (ImageNet1K validation set augmented at various strengths, and other external datasets) are out-of-distribution relative to its training data, providing some insight into the effectiveness of their use as indicators of the trustworthiness of the FID.
title Investigation into using stochastic embedding representations for evaluating the trustworthiness of the Fréchet Inception Distance
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21979