Abstract
Text-to-image generative models have shown remarkable progress in producing diverse and photorealistic outputs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of their effectiveness in creating synthetic portraits that accurately represent various demographic attributes, with a special focus on age, nationality, and gender. Our evaluation employs prompts specifying detailed profiles (e.g., Photorealistic selfie photo of a 32-year-old Canadian male), covering a broad spectrum of 212 nationalities, 30 distinct ages from 10 to 78, and balanced gender representation. We compare the generated images against ground truth age estimates from two established age estimation models to assess how faithfully age is depicted. Our findings reveal that although text-to-image models can consistently generate faces reflecting different identities, the accuracy with which they capture specific ages and do so across diverse demographic backgrounds remains highly variable. These results suggest that current synthetic data may be insufficiently reliable for high-stakes age-related tasks requiring robust precision, unless practitioners are prepared to invest in significant filtering and curation. Nevertheless, they may still be useful in less sensitive or exploratory applications, where absolute age precision is not critical.
Abstract (translated)
文本到图像的生成模型在产生多样性和照片般逼真的输出方面取得了显著进展。在这篇论文中，我们对这些模型在创建能够准确反映各种人口统计特征（特别是年龄、国籍和性别）的人工肖像方面的有效性进行了全面分析。我们的评估使用了指定详细个人资料的提示语（例如，“一个32岁的加拿大男性的现实自拍照”），涵盖了212个不同国家，从10岁到78岁的30种不同的年龄段，并且性别比例均衡。我们通过与两个已建立的年龄估计模型提供的真实年龄估计进行比较来评估生成图像中年龄描绘的真实程度。 我们的研究发现表明，尽管文本到图像的模型能够持续生成反映不同身份特征的脸部图像，但它们捕捉特定年龄以及在多样化的人口统计背景下的准确性仍然存在很大的变异性。这些结果暗示当前合成数据可能不足以用于需要高度精确度的关键性年龄相关任务，除非从业者愿意投入大量精力进行过滤和筛选工作。然而，在不敏感或探索性的应用中，即使绝对的年龄精度不是关键因素，它们仍可能具有一定的实用性。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03420
