Exposing Diversity Bias in Deep Generative Models: Statistical Origins and Correction of Diversity Error

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Autori principali: Farnia, Farzan, Jalali, Mohammad, Ospanov, Azim
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Farnia, Farzan
Jalali, Mohammad
Ospanov, Azim
author_facet Farnia, Farzan
Jalali, Mohammad
Ospanov, Azim
contents Deep generative models have achieved great success in producing high-quality samples, making them a central tool across machine learning applications. Beyond sample quality, an important yet less systematically studied question is whether trained generative models faithfully capture the diversity of the underlying data distribution. In this work, we address this question by directly comparing the diversity of samples generated by state-of-the-art models with that of test samples drawn from the target data distribution, using recently proposed reference-free entropy-based diversity scores, Vendi and RKE. Across multiple benchmark datasets, we find that test data consistently attains substantially higher Vendi and RKE diversity scores than the generated samples, suggesting a systematic downward diversity bias in modern generative models. To understand the origin of this bias, we analyze the finite-sample behavior of entropy-based diversity scores and show that their expected values increase with sample size, implying that diversity estimated from finite training sets could inherently underestimate the diversity of the true distribution. As a result, optimizing the generators to minimize divergence to empirical data distributions would induce a loss of diversity. Finally, we discuss potential diversity-aware regularization and guidance strategies based on Vendi and RKE as principled directions for mitigating this bias, and provide empirical evidence suggesting their potential to improve the results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_14682
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exposing Diversity Bias in Deep Generative Models: Statistical Origins and Correction of Diversity Error
Farnia, Farzan
Jalali, Mohammad
Ospanov, Azim
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Optimization and Control
Deep generative models have achieved great success in producing high-quality samples, making them a central tool across machine learning applications. Beyond sample quality, an important yet less systematically studied question is whether trained generative models faithfully capture the diversity of the underlying data distribution. In this work, we address this question by directly comparing the diversity of samples generated by state-of-the-art models with that of test samples drawn from the target data distribution, using recently proposed reference-free entropy-based diversity scores, Vendi and RKE. Across multiple benchmark datasets, we find that test data consistently attains substantially higher Vendi and RKE diversity scores than the generated samples, suggesting a systematic downward diversity bias in modern generative models. To understand the origin of this bias, we analyze the finite-sample behavior of entropy-based diversity scores and show that their expected values increase with sample size, implying that diversity estimated from finite training sets could inherently underestimate the diversity of the true distribution. As a result, optimizing the generators to minimize divergence to empirical data distributions would induce a loss of diversity. Finally, we discuss potential diversity-aware regularization and guidance strategies based on Vendi and RKE as principled directions for mitigating this bias, and provide empirical evidence suggesting their potential to improve the results.
title Exposing Diversity Bias in Deep Generative Models: Statistical Origins and Correction of Diversity Error
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14682