What Does Fr\'echet Distance Measure? A Directional Decomposition

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.05518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Fr\'echet distance is a de facto standard for evaluating generative models across domains, appearing as FID for images and FVD for videos. It summarizes the discrepancy between generated and reference distributions in a single scalar, with lower values typically interpreted as better generation quality. However, this scalar view can obscure what drives the comparison. For example, in COCO dataset, increasing the number of diffusion sampling s