Intrinsic Multi-scale Evaluation of Generative Models

Generative models are often used to sample high-dimensional data points from a manifold with small intrinsic dimension. Existing techniques for comparing generative models focus on global data properties such as mean and covariance; in that sense, they are extrinsic and uni-scale. We develop the first, to our knowledge, intrinsic and multi-scale method for characterizing and comparing underlying data manifolds, based on comparing all data moments by lower-bounding the spectral notion of the Gromov-Wasserstein distance between manifolds. In a thorough experimental study, we demonstrate that our method effectively evaluates the quality of generative models; further, we showcase its efficacy in discerning the disentanglement process in neural networks.