Beyond FVD: An Enhanced Evaluation Metrics for Video Generation Distribution Quality
Ge Ya Luo Gian Mario Favero ZhiHao Luo Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau Christopher Pal
The Fréchet Video Distance (FVD) is a widely adopted metric for evaluating video generation distribution quality. However, its effectiveness relies on critical assumptions. Our analysis reveals three significant limitations: (1) the non-Gaussianity of the Inflated 3D Convnet (I3D) feature space; (2) the insensitivity of I3D features to temporal distortions; (3) the impractical sample sizes required for reliable estimation. These findings undermine FVD's reliability and show that FVD falls short as a standalone metric for video generation evaluation. After extensive analysis of a wide range of metrics and backbone architectures, we propose JEDi, the JEPA Embedding Distance, 
based on features derived from a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, measured using Maximum Mean Discrepancy with polynomial kernel.  Our experiments on multiple open-source datasets show clear evidence that it is a superior alternative to the widely used FVD metric, requiring only 16% of the samples to reach its steady value, while increasing alignment with human evaluation by 34%, on average.

Project page: https://oooolga.github.io/JEDi.github.io/.
Video quality metrics, Frechet Video Distance, Inflated 3D Convnet, VideoMAE, VJEPA, kernel metrics