Enhancing Plausibility Evaluation for Generated Designs with Denoising Autoencoder

A great interest has arisen in using Deep Generative Models (DGM) for generative design. When assessing the quality of the generated designs, human designers focus more on structural plausibility, e.g., no missing component, rather than visual artifacts, e.g., noises in the images. Meanwhile, commonly used metrics such as Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) may not evaluate accurately as they tend to penalize visual artifacts instead of structural implausibility. As such, FID might not be suitable to assess the performance of DGMs for a generative design task. In this work, we propose to encode the input designs with a simple Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) and measure the distribution distance in the latent space thereof. We experimentally test our DAE-based metrics with FID and other state-of-the-art metrics on three data sets: compared to FID and some more recent works, e.g., FD (DINOv2) and topology distance, DAE-based metrics can effectively detect implausible structures and are more consistent with structural inspection by human experts.