What's Producible May Not Be Reachable: Measuring the Steerability of Generative Models

How should we evaluate the quality of generative models? Many existing metrics focus on a model's producibility, i.e. the quality and breadth of outputs it can generate. However, the actual value from using a generative model stems not just from what it can produce but whether a user with a specific goal can produce an output that satisfies that goal. We refer to this property as steerability. In this paper, we first introduce a mathematical framework for evaluating steerability independently from producibility. Steerability is more challenging to evaluate than producibility because it requires knowing a user's goals. We address this issue by creating a benchmark task that relies on one key idea: sample an output from a generative model and ask users to reproduce it. We implement this benchmark in a large-scale user study of text-to-image models and large language models. Despite the ability of these models to produce high-quality outputs, they all perform poorly on steerabilty. This suggests that we need to focus on improving the steerability of generative models. We show such improvements are indeed possible: through reinforcement learning techniques, we create an alternative steering mechanism for image models that achieves more than 2x improvement on this benchmark.

@article{vafa2025_2503.17482,
  title={ What's Producible May Not Be Reachable: Measuring the Steerability of Generative Models },
  author={ Keyon Vafa and Sarah Bentley and Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17482},
  year={ 2025 }
}