# A New Perspective on Precision and Recall for Generative Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02414/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [Assessing Generative Models via Precision and Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00035/) (2018)
- [MAUVE Scores for Generative Models: Theory and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14578/) (2022)
- [TopP&R: Robust Support Estimation Approach for Evaluating Fidelity and Diversity in Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08013/) (2023)
- [Evaluating generative networks using Gaussian mixtures of image features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05240/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Precision and Recall Towards Reliable Evaluation of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01590/) (2023)
- [On the Theoretical Equivalence of Several Trade-Off Curves Assessing Statistical Proximity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11809/) (2020)
- [Emergent Asymmetry of Precision and Recall for Measuring Fidelity and Diversity of Generative Models in High Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09618/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the recent success of generative models in image and text, the question of their evaluation has recently gained a lot of attention. While most methods from the state of the art rely on scalar metrics, the introduction of Precision and Recall (PR) for generative model has opened up a new avenue of research. The associated PR curve allows for a richer analysis, but their estimation poses several challenges. In this paper, we present a new framework for estimating entire PR curves based on a binary classification standpoint. We conduct a thorough statistical analysis of the proposed estimates. As a byproduct, we obtain a minimax upper bound on the PR estimation risk. We also show that our framework extends several landmark PR metrics of the literature which by design are restrained to the extreme values of the curve. Finally, we study the different behaviors of the curves obtained experimentally in various settings.