The FID Lottery: Quantifying Hidden Randomness in Generative-Model Evaluation
The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) is the de facto arbiter of image generation, yet most papers report just a single number from a single trained model using a single sampling seed. How reproducible is that number if we retrain the model, or merely resample from it? In this paper, we treat FID as a random variable on a two-axis panel of training and generation seeds, and measure its variance directly on several hundred SiT networks trained on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256. We report surprising findings: (a) Retraining the model using the same recipe with a different seed moves FID 3.2x more (in Inception feature space) than redrawing samples from a fixed network. (b) That gap is dr...
| Authors | Nicolas Dufour, Alexei A. Efros, Patrick Pérez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
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