Beyond the Stitching Assumption: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Synthetic Data Evaluation via Semantic Quantization

arXiv:2609.22149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal synthetic datasets combine structured attributes with free text, but are often evaluated separately. Such metrics can remain high after tabular--text pairings are disrupted. We present a projection-based evaluator for tabular--text synthetic data. A fixed sentence encoder maps text to embeddings, \(k\)-means converts them to cluster states, and tabular variables are represented as categorical or quantile-binned states. Real and synthetic contingency tables are compared using Jensen--Shannon divergence (JSD), normalized mutual information (NMI), conditional JSD (cJSD), and joint-state entropy. We also report text-to-attribute (T2A) utility and a holdout-calibrated proximity flag rate (PFR) as a representation-level diagnostic. A text-permutation control preserves both marginal distributions while disrupting their pairing. Experiments on Amazon Reviews, Kiva Loans, and the Employment Scam Aegean Dataset show that modality-specific scores remain high under this control. The projection diagnostics detect disruption when real projected dependence exceeds a permutation baseline, but are less informative for weak or sparse projections. Some conditioned LLM baselines also exhibit stronger measured dependence than the corresponding real-data projections. These results support explicit cross-modal evaluation with permutation baselines and coverage reporting.