# TISE: Bag of Metrics for Text-to-Image Synthesis Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01398/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [DM-GAN: Dynamic Memory Generative Adversarial Networks for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01310/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [HRS-Bench: Holistic, Reliable and Scalable Benchmark for Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05390/) (2023)
- [Toward Verifiable and Reproducible Human Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01816/) (2023)
- [Video Background Music Generation: Dataset, Method and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11248/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Quality Metrics for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11821/) (2024)
- [Vision + Language Applications: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14598/) (2023)
- [A User-Friendly Framework for Generating Model-Preferred Prompts in Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12760/) (2024)
- [Trustworthy Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Timely and Focused Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18214/) (2024)
- [Hypernymy Understanding Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models via WordNet Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09247/) (2023)
- [Gen4Gen: Generative Data Pipeline for Generative Multi-Concept Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15504/) (2024)
- [Trade-offs in Image Generation: How Do Different Dimensions Interact?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22100/) (2025)
- [SANEval: Open-Vocabulary Compositional Benchmarks with Failure-mode Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00249/) (2026)
- [Towards Evaluating Robustness of Prompt Adherence in Text to Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08039/) (2025)
- [InsHuman: Towards Natural and Identity-Preserving Human Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07402/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we conduct a study on the state-of-the-art methods for text-to-image synthesis and propose a framework to evaluate these methods. We consider syntheses where an image contains a single or multiple objects. Our study outlines several issues in the current evaluation pipeline: (i) for image quality assessment, a commonly used metric, e.g., Inception Score (IS), is often either miscalibrated for the single-object case or misused for the multi-object case; (ii) for text relevance and object accuracy assessment, there is an overfitting phenomenon in the existing R-precision (RP) and Semantic Object Accuracy (SOA) metrics, respectively; (iii) for multi-object case, many vital factors for evaluation, e.g., object fidelity, positional alignment, counting alignment, are largely dismissed; (iv) the ranking of the methods based on current metrics is highly inconsistent with real images. To overcome these issues, we propose a combined set of existing and new metrics to systematically evaluate the methods. For existing metrics, we offer an improved version of IS named IS* by using temperature scaling to calibrate the confidence of the classifier used by IS; we also propose a solution to mitigate the overfitting issues of RP and SOA. For new metrics, we develop counting alignment, positional alignment, object-centric IS, and object-centric FID metrics for evaluating the multi-object case. We show that benchmarking with our bag of metrics results in a highly consistent ranking among existing methods that is well-aligned with human evaluation. As a by-product, we create AttnGAN++, a simple but strong baseline for the benchmark by stabilizing the training of AttnGAN using spectral normalization. We also release our toolbox, so-called TISE, for advocating fair and consistent evaluation of text-to-image models.