Beyond the Pixels: VLM-based Evaluation of Identity Preservation in Reference-Guided Synthesis

The 'Beyond the Pixels' framework, introduced on November 12, 2025, tackles the critical challenge of evaluating identity preservation in generative models, an area that has seen limited progress. Traditional metrics often fail to capture nuanced identity changes, leading to inconsistencies in assessments. This new hierarchical framework decomposes identity evaluation into a structured decision tree, allowing for more precise transformations rather than vague similarity scores. By grounding evaluations in verifiable visual evidence, it significantly reduces hallucinations and improves consistency. The framework was rigorously validated across four state-of-the-art generative models, demonstrating strong alignment with human judgments in measuring identity consistency. Furthermore, a new benchmark consisting of 1,078 image-prompt pairs was introduced to stress-test generative models, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation process that includes underrepresented categories, such as anthropom…