# The SVHN Dataset Is Deceptive for Probabilistic Generative Models Due to a Distribution Mismatch

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02168 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02168/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09136/) (2018)
- [PixelCNN++: Improving the PixelCNN with Discretized Logistic Mixture Likelihood and Other Modifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05517/) (2017)
- [Input complexity and out-of-distribution detection with likelihood-based generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11480/) (2019)
- [Likelihood Regret: An Out-of-Distribution Detection Score For Variational Auto-encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02977/) (2020)
- [Constructing Unrestricted Adversarial Examples with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07894/) (2018)
- [Improving GANs Using Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05573/) (2018)
- [Auxiliary Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05473/) (2016)
- [Adversarial examples for generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06832/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Ctrl-A: Control-Driven Online Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21819/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Street View House Numbers (SVHN) dataset is a popular benchmark dataset in deep learning. Originally designed for digit classification tasks, the SVHN dataset has been widely used as a benchmark for various other tasks including generative modeling. However, with this work, we aim to warn the community about an issue of the SVHN dataset as a benchmark for generative modeling tasks: we discover that the official split into training set and test set of the SVHN dataset are not drawn from the same distribution. We empirically show that this distribution mismatch has little impact on the classification task (which may explain why this issue has not been detected before), but it severely affects the evaluation of probabilistic generative models, such as Variational Autoencoders and diffusion models. As a workaround, we propose to mix and re-split the official training and test set when SVHN is used for tasks other than classification. We publish a new split and the indices we used to create it at https://jzenn.github.io/svhn-remix/ .