Protein FID: Improved Evaluation of Protein Structure Generative Models

Abstract: Protein structure generative models have seen a recent surge of interest, but meaningfully evaluating them computationally is an active area of research. While current metrics have driven useful progress, they do not capture how well models sample the design space represented by the training data. We argue for a protein Frechet Inception Distance (FID) metric to supplement current evaluations with a measure of distributional similarity in a semantically meaningful latent space. Our FID behaves desirably under protein structure perturbations and correctly recapitulates similarities between protein samples: it correlates with optimal transport distances and recovers FoldSeek clusters and the CATH hierarchy. Evaluating current protein structure generative models with FID shows that they fall short of modeling the distribution of PDB proteins.