ID-Sim: An Identity-Focused Similarity Metric

Julia Chae, Nicholas Kolkin, Jui-Hsien Wang, Richard Zhang, Sara Beery, Cusuh Ham; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 11250-11262

Humans have remarkable selective sensitivity to identities--they easily distinguish between highly-similar identities, even across significantly different contexts such as diverse viewpoints or lighting. Vision models have struggled to match this capability, and progress towards identity-focused tasks such as personalized image generation is slowed by a lack of identity-focused evaluation metrics. To help facilitate progress, we propose ID-Sim, a feed-forward metric designed to faithfully reflect human selective sensitivity. To build ID-Sim, we curate a high-quality training set of images spanning diverse real-world domains, augmented with generative synthetic data that provides controlled, fine-grained identity and contextual variations. We evaluate our metric on a new unified evaluation benchmark for assessing consistency with human annotations across identity-focused recognition, retrieval, and generative tasks.