# TRIG: Toward Measuring Texture Realism in Image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15164 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15164/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00273/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Rethinking FID: Towards a Better Evaluation Metric for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09603/) (2023)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Deep Compression Autoencoder for Efficient High-Resolution Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10733/) (2024)
- [Exposing flaws of generative model evaluation metrics and their unfair treatment of diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04675/) (2023)
- [Effectively Unbiased FID and Inception Score and where to find them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07023/) (2019)
- [PieAPP: Perceptual Image-Error Assessment through Pairwise Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02067/) (2018)
- [Fourier Spectrum Discrepancies in Deep Network Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06465/) (2019)
- [Intriguing properties of synthetic images: from generative adversarial networks to diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06408/) (2023)
- [One-step Latent-free Image Generation with Pixel Mean Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22158/) (2026)
- [From BoW to CNN: Two Decades of Texture Representation for Texture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10324/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Flow Matching for Scalable Multi-Modal Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06507/) (2026)
- [Characterizing Photorealism and Artifacts in Diffusion Model-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11989/) (2025)
- [SoFlow: Solution Flow Models for One-Step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15657/) (2025)
- [Comparison of Image Quality Models for Optimization of Image Processing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01338/) (2020)
- [Reconstruct-and-Generate Diffusion Model for Detail-Preserving Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10714/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper studies the backbone used by metrics for evaluating the quality of generated images. Although generative models have advanced rapidly, some outputs still exhibit unrealistic texture characteristics, and these differences are difficult to measure. Widely used evaluation metrics provide limited insight into texture realism, since they often rely on a backbone trained for another objective, such as image classification or image-text alignment. Such objectives typically encourage invariance to low-level variations that carry texture, so the resulting features primarily encode semantic and global structure. As a result, texture-specific discrepancies may not be explicitly captured. We propose TRIG, a metric directed at the texture realism of generated images. Its backbone is instead the discriminator of a generative adversarial network pre-trained on a texture dataset, which provides a learned prior for the local statistics of natural textures. A plausibility head is fine-tuned to identify local texture degradations, while preserving natural defocus and sensor noise as positive cases. On the features of this backbone, we compute a standard distributional distance between a reference set of real images and a set of generated ones. We apply TRIG to several generative models and observe closer agreement with human realness ratings than baseline metrics.