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Oct 28

DATED: Guidelines for Creating Synthetic Datasets for Engineering Design Applications

Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significant challenge for researchers aiming to apply these breakthroughs in engineering design. Synthetic datasets emerge as a viable alternative. However, practitioners are often uncertain about generating high-quality datasets that accurately represent real-world data and are suitable for the intended downstream applications. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing comprehensive guidelines for generating, annotating, and validating synthetic datasets. The trade-offs and methods associated with each of these aspects are elaborated upon. Further, the practical implications of these guidelines are illustrated through the creation of a turbo-compressors dataset. The study underscores the importance of thoughtful sampling methods to ensure the appropriate size, diversity, utility, and realism of a dataset. It also highlights that design diversity does not equate to performance diversity or realism. By employing test sets that represent uniform, real, or task-specific samples, the influence of sample size and sampling strategy is scrutinized. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers intending to create and publish synthetic datasets for engineering design, thereby paving the way for more effective applications of AI advancements in the field. The code and data for the dataset and methods are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/cyrilpic/radcomp .

  • 3 authors
·
May 15, 2023

Exploring the Potential of AI-Generated Synthetic Datasets: A Case Study on Telematics Data with ChatGPT

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 23, 2023

BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion

We show, for the first time, that neural networks trained only on synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the problem of 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation from real images. Previous synthetic datasets have been small, unrealistic, or lacked realistic clothing. Achieving sufficient realism is non-trivial and we show how to do this for full bodies in motion. Specifically, our BEDLAM dataset contains monocular RGB videos with ground-truth 3D bodies in SMPL-X format. It includes a diversity of body shapes, motions, skin tones, hair, and clothing. The clothing is realistically simulated on the moving bodies using commercial clothing physics simulation. We render varying numbers of people in realistic scenes with varied lighting and camera motions. We then train various HPS regressors using BEDLAM and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on real-image benchmarks despite training with synthetic data. We use BEDLAM to gain insights into what model design choices are important for accuracy. With good synthetic training data, we find that a basic method like HMR approaches the accuracy of the current SOTA method (CLIFF). BEDLAM is useful for a variety of tasks and all images, ground truth bodies, 3D clothing, support code, and more are available for research purposes. Additionally, we provide detailed information about our synthetic data generation pipeline, enabling others to generate their own datasets. See the project page: https://bedlam.is.tue.mpg.de/.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 29, 2023

A Synthetic Dataset for Personal Attribute Inference

Recently, powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) have become easily accessible to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. However, their strong capabilities and vast world knowledge do not come without associated privacy risks. In this work, we focus on the emerging privacy threat LLMs pose - the ability to accurately infer personal information from online texts. Despite the growing importance of LLM-based author profiling, research in this area has been hampered by a lack of suitable public datasets, largely due to ethical and privacy concerns associated with real personal data. In this work, we take two steps to address this problem: (i) we construct a simulation framework for the popular social media platform Reddit using LLM agents seeded with synthetic personal profiles; (ii) using this framework, we generate SynthPAI, a diverse synthetic dataset of over 7800 comments manually labeled for personal attributes. We validate our dataset with a human study showing that humans barely outperform random guessing on the task of distinguishing our synthetic comments from real ones. Further, we verify that our dataset enables meaningful personal attribute inference research by showing across 18 state-of-the-art LLMs that our synthetic comments allow us to draw the same conclusions as real-world data. Together, this indicates that our dataset and pipeline provide a strong and privacy-preserving basis for future research toward understanding and mitigating the inference-based privacy threats LLMs pose.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 11, 2024

MORDA: A Synthetic Dataset to Facilitate Adaptation of Object Detectors to Unseen Real-target Domain While Preserving Performance on Real-source Domain

Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 8

PSELDNets: Pre-trained Neural Networks on Large-scale Synthetic Datasets for Sound Event Localization and Detection

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) has seen substantial advancements through learning-based methods. These systems, typically trained from scratch on specific datasets, have shown considerable generalization capabilities. Recently, deep neural networks trained on large-scale datasets have achieved remarkable success in the sound event classification (SEC) field, prompting an open question of whether these advancements can be extended to develop general-purpose SELD models. In this paper, leveraging the power of pre-trained SEC models, we propose pre-trained SELD networks (PSELDNets) on large-scale synthetic datasets. These synthetic datasets, generated by convolving sound events with simulated spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs), contain 1,167 hours of audio clips with an ontology of 170 sound classes. These PSELDNets are transferred to downstream SELD tasks. When we adapt PSELDNets to specific scenarios, particularly in low-resource data cases, we introduce a data-efficient fine-tuning method, AdapterBit. PSELDNets are evaluated on a synthetic-test-set using collected SRIRs from TAU Spatial Room Impulse Response Database (TAU-SRIR DB) and achieve satisfactory performance. We also conduct our experiments to validate the transferability of PSELDNets to three publicly available datasets and our own collected audio recordings. Results demonstrate that PSELDNets surpass state-of-the-art systems across all publicly available datasets. Given the need for direction-of-arrival estimation, SELD generally relies on sufficient multi-channel audio clips. However, incorporating the AdapterBit, PSELDNets show more efficient adaptability to various tasks using minimal multi-channel or even just monophonic audio clips, outperforming the traditional fine-tuning approaches.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 10, 2024

SynC: Synthetic Image Caption Dataset Refinement with One-to-many Mapping for Zero-shot Image Captioning

Zero-shot Image Captioning (ZIC) increasingly utilizes synthetic datasets generated by text-to-image (T2I) models to mitigate the need for costly manual annotation. However, these T2I models often produce images that exhibit semantic misalignments with their corresponding input captions (e.g., missing objects, incorrect attributes), resulting in noisy synthetic image-caption pairs that can hinder model training. Existing dataset pruning techniques are largely designed for removing noisy text in web-crawled data. However, these methods are ill-suited for the distinct challenges of synthetic data, where captions are typically well-formed, but images may be inaccurate representations. To address this gap, we introduce SynC, a novel framework specifically designed to refine synthetic image-caption datasets for ZIC. Instead of conventional filtering or regeneration, SynC focuses on reassigning captions to the most semantically aligned images already present within the synthetic image pool. Our approach employs a one-to-many mapping strategy by initially retrieving multiple relevant candidate images for each caption. We then apply a cycle-consistency-inspired alignment scorer that selects the best image by verifying its ability to retrieve the original caption via image-to-text retrieval. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SynC consistently and significantly improves performance across various ZIC models on standard benchmarks (MS-COCO, Flickr30k, NoCaps), achieving state-of-the-art results in several scenarios. SynC offers an effective strategy for curating refined synthetic data to enhance ZIC.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 24

Thousand Voices of Trauma: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Modeling Prolonged Exposure Therapy Conversations

The advancement of AI systems for mental health support is hindered by limited access to therapeutic conversation data, particularly for trauma treatment. We present Thousand Voices of Trauma, a synthetic benchmark dataset of 3,000 therapy conversations based on Prolonged Exposure therapy protocols for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The dataset comprises 500 unique cases, each explored through six conversational perspectives that mirror the progression of therapy from initial anxiety to peak distress to emotional processing. We incorporated diverse demographic profiles (ages 18-80, M=49.3, 49.4% male, 44.4% female, 6.2% non-binary), 20 trauma types, and 10 trauma-related behaviors using deterministic and probabilistic generation methods. Analysis reveals realistic distributions of trauma types (witnessing violence 10.6%, bullying 10.2%) and symptoms (nightmares 23.4%, substance abuse 20.8%). Clinical experts validated the dataset's therapeutic fidelity, highlighting its emotional depth while suggesting refinements for greater authenticity. We also developed an emotional trajectory benchmark with standardized metrics for evaluating model responses. This privacy-preserving dataset addresses critical gaps in trauma-focused mental health data, offering a valuable resource for advancing both patient-facing applications and clinician training tools.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 16

RTMV: A Ray-Traced Multi-View Synthetic Dataset for Novel View Synthesis

We present a large-scale synthetic dataset for novel view synthesis consisting of ~300k images rendered from nearly 2000 complex scenes using high-quality ray tracing at high resolution (1600 x 1600 pixels). The dataset is orders of magnitude larger than existing synthetic datasets for novel view synthesis, thus providing a large unified benchmark for both training and evaluation. Using 4 distinct sources of high-quality 3D meshes, the scenes of our dataset exhibit challenging variations in camera views, lighting, shape, materials, and textures. Because our dataset is too large for existing methods to process, we propose Sparse Voxel Light Field (SVLF), an efficient voxel-based light field approach for novel view synthesis that achieves comparable performance to NeRF on synthetic data, while being an order of magnitude faster to train and two orders of magnitude faster to render. SVLF achieves this speed by relying on a sparse voxel octree, careful voxel sampling (requiring only a handful of queries per ray), and reduced network structure; as well as ground truth depth maps at training time. Our dataset is generated by NViSII, a Python-based ray tracing renderer, which is designed to be simple for non-experts to use and share, flexible and powerful through its use of scripting, and able to create high-quality and physically-based rendered images. Experiments with a subset of our dataset allow us to compare standard methods like NeRF and mip-NeRF for single-scene modeling, and pixelNeRF for category-level modeling, pointing toward the need for future improvements in this area.

  • 12 authors
·
May 14, 2022

AccVideo: Accelerating Video Diffusion Model with Synthetic Dataset

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in the field of video generation. However, their iterative denoising nature requires a large number of inference steps to generate a video, which is slow and computationally expensive. In this paper, we begin with a detailed analysis of the challenges present in existing diffusion distillation methods and propose a novel efficient method, namely AccVideo, to reduce the inference steps for accelerating video diffusion models with synthetic dataset. We leverage the pretrained video diffusion model to generate multiple valid denoising trajectories as our synthetic dataset, which eliminates the use of useless data points during distillation. Based on the synthetic dataset, we design a trajectory-based few-step guidance that utilizes key data points from the denoising trajectories to learn the noise-to-video mapping, enabling video generation in fewer steps. Furthermore, since the synthetic dataset captures the data distribution at each diffusion timestep, we introduce an adversarial training strategy to align the output distribution of the student model with that of our synthetic dataset, thereby enhancing the video quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves 8.5x improvements in generation speed compared to the teacher model while maintaining comparable performance. Compared to previous accelerating methods, our approach is capable of generating videos with higher quality and resolution, i.e., 5-seconds, 720x1280, 24fps.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25 2

PIKA: Expert-Level Synthetic Datasets for Post-Training Alignment from Scratch

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness depends on high-quality instruction data. Most existing alignment datasets are either private or require costly human annotation, which limits reproducibility and scalability. Even with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF), concerns about data quality remain. Moreover, it is unclear how much data is actually required to fine-tune a base model into a strong instruction-following model. Current approaches often rely on over 300k examples even at the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, yet they still underperform compared to proprietary models, creating barriers for academic and resource-limited communities. To address this gap, we introduce PiKa, a data-efficient family of expert-level alignment datasets. In particular, the PiKa-SFT dataset uses only 30k SFT examples, far fewer than state-of-the-art datasets like Magpie. Through evaluations by fine-tuning Llama-3-8B-Base on PiKa and other public datasets, we show that PiKa-SFT outperforms models trained on much larger data. On AlpacaEval 2.0 and Arena-Hard benchmarks, PiKa-SFT fine-tuning even surpasses the official Llama-3-8B-Instruct model trained on over 10 million proprietary examples. We further extend our study by training the Qwen2.5 series (0.5B to 7B) on PiKa-SFT, achieving consistent gains. These findings demonstrate that high-quality alignment can be achieved with significantly less data, offering a scalable path for open-source LLM alignment. Code and data: https://github.com/SJY8460/PiKa.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 8

FFHQ-Makeup: Paired Synthetic Makeup Dataset with Facial Consistency Across Multiple Styles

Paired bare-makeup facial images are essential for a wide range of beauty-related tasks, such as virtual try-on, facial privacy protection, and facial aesthetics analysis. However, collecting high-quality paired makeup datasets remains a significant challenge. Real-world data acquisition is constrained by the difficulty of collecting large-scale paired images, while existing synthetic approaches often suffer from limited realism or inconsistencies between bare and makeup images. Current synthetic methods typically fall into two categories: warping-based transformations, which often distort facial geometry and compromise the precision of makeup; and text-to-image generation, which tends to alter facial identity and expression, undermining consistency. In this work, we present FFHQ-Makeup, a high-quality synthetic makeup dataset that pairs each identity with multiple makeup styles while preserving facial consistency in both identity and expression. Built upon the diverse FFHQ dataset, our pipeline transfers real-world makeup styles from existing datasets onto 18K identities by introducing an improved makeup transfer method that disentangles identity and makeup. Each identity is paired with 5 different makeup styles, resulting in a total of 90K high-quality bare-makeup image pairs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses specifically on constructing a makeup dataset. We hope that FFHQ-Makeup fills the gap of lacking high-quality bare-makeup paired datasets and serves as a valuable resource for future research in beauty-related tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 5

SCALEFeedback: A Large-Scale Dataset of Synthetic Computer Science Assignments for LLM-generated Educational Feedback Research

Using LLMs to give educational feedback to students for their assignments has attracted much attention in the AI in Education field. Yet, there is currently no large-scale open-source dataset of student assignments that includes detailed assignment descriptions, rubrics, and student submissions across various courses. As a result, research on generalisable methodology for automatic generation of effective and responsible educational feedback remains limited. In the current study, we constructed a large-scale dataset of Synthetic Computer science Assignments for LLM-generated Educational Feedback research (SCALEFeedback). We proposed a Sophisticated Assignment Mimicry (SAM) framework to generate the synthetic dataset by one-to-one LLM-based imitation from real assignment descriptions, student submissions to produce their synthetic versions. Our open-source dataset contains 10,000 synthetic student submissions spanning 155 assignments across 59 university-level computer science courses. Our synthetic submissions achieved BERTScore F1 0.84, PCC of 0.62 for assignment marks and 0.85 for length, compared to the corresponding real-world assignment dataset, while ensuring perfect protection of student private information. All these results of our SAM framework outperformed results of a naive mimicry method baseline. The LLM-generated feedback for our synthetic assignments demonstrated the same level of effectiveness compared to that of real-world assignment dataset. Our research showed that one-to-one LLM imitation is a promising method for generating open-source synthetic educational datasets that preserve the original dataset's semantic meaning and student data distribution, while protecting student privacy and institutional copyright. SCALEFeedback enhances our ability to develop LLM-based generalisable methods for offering high-quality, automated educational feedback in a scalable way.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 7

PANORAMA: A synthetic PII-laced dataset for studying sensitive data memorization in LLMs

The memorization of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) by large language models (LLMs) poses growing privacy risks as models scale and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Existing efforts to study sensitive and PII data memorization and develop mitigation strategies are hampered by the absence of comprehensive, realistic, and ethically sourced datasets reflecting the diversity of sensitive information found on the web. We introduce PANORAMA - Profile-based Assemblage for Naturalistic Online Representation and Attribute Memorization Analysis, a large-scale synthetic corpus of 384,789 samples derived from 9,674 synthetic profiles designed to closely emulate the distribution, variety, and context of PII and sensitive data as it naturally occurs in online environments. Our data generation pipeline begins with the construction of internally consistent, multi-attribute human profiles using constrained selection to reflect real-world demographics such as education, health attributes, financial status, etc. Using a combination of zero-shot prompting and OpenAI o3-mini, we generate diverse content types - including wiki-style articles, social media posts, forum discussions, online reviews, comments, and marketplace listings - each embedding realistic, contextually appropriate PII and other sensitive information. We validate the utility of PANORAMA by fine-tuning the Mistral-7B model on 1x, 5x, 10x, and 25x data replication rates with a subset of data and measure PII memorization rates - revealing not only consistent increases with repetition but also variation across content types, highlighting PANORAMA's ability to model how memorization risks differ by context. Our dataset and code are publicly available, providing a much-needed resource for privacy risk assessment, model auditing, and the development of privacy-preserving LLMs.

  • 2 authors
·
May 18

STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Dataset

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually suffer from extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality data samples. Motivated by this, we explore the procedurally synthetic 3D data generation paradigm to equip individuals with the full capability of creating large-scale annotated photogrammetry point clouds. Specifically, we introduce a synthetic aerial photogrammetry point clouds generation pipeline that takes full advantage of open geospatial data sources and off-the-shelf commercial packages. Unlike generating synthetic data in virtual games, where the simulated data usually have limited gaming environments created by artists, the proposed pipeline simulates the reconstruction process of the real environment by following the same UAV flight pattern on different synthetic terrain shapes and building densities, which ensure similar quality, noise pattern, and diversity with real data. In addition, the precise semantic and instance annotations can be generated fully automatically, avoiding the expensive and time-consuming manual annotation. Based on the proposed pipeline, we present a richly-annotated synthetic 3D aerial photogrammetry point cloud dataset, termed STPLS3D, with more than 16 km^2 of landscapes and up to 18 fine-grained semantic categories. For verification purposes, we also provide a parallel dataset collected from four areas in the real environment. Extensive experiments conducted on our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and quality of the proposed synthetic dataset.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 16, 2022

Diverse And Private Synthetic Datasets Generation for RAG evaluation: A multi-agent framework

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems improve large language model outputs by incorporating external knowledge, enabling more informed and context-aware responses. However, the effectiveness and trustworthiness of these systems critically depends on how they are evaluated, particularly on whether the evaluation process captures real-world constraints like protecting sensitive information. While current evaluation efforts for RAG systems have primarily focused on the development of performance metrics, far less attention has been given to the design and quality of the underlying evaluation datasets, despite their pivotal role in enabling meaningful, reliable assessments. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-agent framework for generating synthetic QA datasets for RAG evaluation that prioritize semantic diversity and privacy preservation. Our approach involves: (1) a Diversity agent leveraging clustering techniques to maximize topical coverage and semantic variability, (2) a Privacy Agent that detects and mask sensitive information across multiple domains and (3) a QA curation agent that synthesizes private and diverse QA pairs suitable as ground truth for RAG evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our evaluation sets outperform baseline methods in diversity and achieve robust privacy masking on domain-specific datasets. This work offers a practical and ethically aligned pathway toward safer, more comprehensive RAG system evaluation, laying the foundation for future enhancements aligned with evolving AI regulations and compliance standards.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 26

Large Language Models and Synthetic Data for Monitoring Dataset Mentions in Research Papers

Tracking how data is mentioned and used in research papers provides critical insights for improving data discoverability, quality, and production. However, manually identifying and classifying dataset mentions across vast academic literature is resource-intensive and not scalable. This paper presents a machine learning framework that automates dataset mention detection across research domains by leveraging large language models (LLMs), synthetic data, and a two-stage fine-tuning process. We employ zero-shot extraction from research papers, an LLM-as-a-Judge for quality assessment, and a reasoning agent for refinement to generate a weakly supervised synthetic dataset. The Phi-3.5-mini instruct model is pre-fine-tuned on this dataset, followed by fine-tuning on a manually annotated subset. At inference, a ModernBERT-based classifier efficiently filters dataset mentions, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high recall. Evaluated on a held-out manually annotated sample, our fine-tuned model outperforms NuExtract-v1.5 and GLiNER-large-v2.1 in dataset extraction accuracy. Our results highlight how LLM-generated synthetic data can effectively address training data scarcity, improving generalization in low-resource settings. This framework offers a pathway toward scalable monitoring of dataset usage, enhancing transparency, and supporting researchers, funders, and policymakers in identifying data gaps and strengthening data accessibility for informed decision-making.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14

SIG: A Synthetic Identity Generation Pipeline for Generating Evaluation Datasets for Face Recognition

As Artificial Intelligence applications expand, the evaluation of models faces heightened scrutiny. Ensuring public readiness requires evaluation datasets, which differ from training data by being disjoint and ethically sourced in compliance with privacy regulations. The performance and fairness of face recognition systems depend significantly on the quality and representativeness of these evaluation datasets. This data is sometimes scraped from the internet without user's consent, causing ethical concerns that can prohibit its use without proper releases. In rare cases, data is collected in a controlled environment with consent, however, this process is time-consuming, expensive, and logistically difficult to execute. This creates a barrier for those unable to conjure the immense resources required to gather ethically sourced evaluation datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce the Synthetic Identity Generation pipeline, or SIG, that allows for the targeted creation of ethical, balanced datasets for face recognition evaluation. Our proposed and demonstrated pipeline generates high-quality images of synthetic identities with controllable pose, facial features, and demographic attributes, such as race, gender, and age. We also release an open-source evaluation dataset named ControlFace10k, consisting of 10,008 face images of 3,336 unique synthetic identities balanced across race, gender, and age, generated using the proposed SIG pipeline. We analyze ControlFace10k along with a non-synthetic BUPT dataset using state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms to demonstrate its effectiveness as an evaluation tool. This analysis highlights the dataset's characteristics and its utility in assessing algorithmic bias across different demographic groups.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

IDiff-Face: Synthetic-based Face Recognition through Fizzy Identity-Conditioned Diffusion Models

The availability of large-scale authentic face databases has been crucial to the significant advances made in face recognition research over the past decade. However, legal and ethical concerns led to the recent retraction of many of these databases by their creators, raising questions about the continuity of future face recognition research without one of its key resources. Synthetic datasets have emerged as a promising alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data for face recognition development. However, recent synthetic datasets that are used to train face recognition models suffer either from limitations in intra-class diversity or cross-class (identity) discrimination, leading to less optimal accuracies, far away from the accuracies achieved by models trained on authentic data. This paper targets this issue by proposing IDiff-Face, a novel approach based on conditional latent diffusion models for synthetic identity generation with realistic identity variations for face recognition training. Through extensive evaluations, our proposed synthetic-based face recognition approach pushed the limits of state-of-the-art performances, achieving, for example, 98.00% accuracy on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, far ahead from the recent synthetic-based face recognition solutions with 95.40% and bridging the gap to authentic-based face recognition with 99.82% accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 9, 2023

RoboVerse: Towards a Unified Platform, Dataset and Benchmark for Scalable and Generalizable Robot Learning

Data scaling and standardized evaluation benchmarks have driven significant advances in natural language processing and computer vision. However, robotics faces unique challenges in scaling data and establishing evaluation protocols. Collecting real-world data is resource-intensive and inefficient, while benchmarking in real-world scenarios remains highly complex. Synthetic data and simulation offer promising alternatives, yet existing efforts often fall short in data quality, diversity, and benchmark standardization. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboVerse, a comprehensive framework comprising a simulation platform, a synthetic dataset, and unified benchmarks. Our simulation platform supports multiple simulators and robotic embodiments, enabling seamless transitions between different environments. The synthetic dataset, featuring high-fidelity physics and photorealistic rendering, is constructed through multiple approaches. Additionally, we propose unified benchmarks for imitation learning and reinforcement learning, enabling evaluation across different levels of generalization. At the core of the simulation platform is MetaSim, an infrastructure that abstracts diverse simulation environments into a universal interface. It restructures existing simulation environments into a simulator-agnostic configuration system, as well as an API aligning different simulator functionalities, such as launching simulation environments, loading assets with initial states, stepping the physics engine, etc. This abstraction ensures interoperability and extensibility. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RoboVerse enhances the performance of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world model learning, and sim-to-real transfer. These results validate the reliability of our dataset and benchmarks, establishing RoboVerse as a robust solution for advancing robot learning.

Standardized Benchmark Dataset for Localized Exposure to a Realistic Source at 10$-$90 GHz

The lack of freely available standardized datasets represents an aggravating factor during the development and testing the performance of novel computational techniques in exposure assessment and dosimetry research. This hinders progress as researchers are required to generate numerical data (field, power and temperature distribution) anew using simulation software for each exposure scenario. Other than being time consuming, this approach is highly susceptible to errors that occur during the configuration of the electromagnetic model. To address this issue, in this paper, the limited available data on the incident power density and resultant maximum temperature rise on the skin surface considering various steady-state exposure scenarios at 10-90 GHz have been statistically modeled. The synthetic data have been sampled from the fitted statistical multivariate distribution with respect to predetermined dosimetric constraints. We thus present a comprehensive and open-source dataset compiled of the high-fidelity numerical data considering various exposures to a realistic source. Furthermore, different surrogate models for predicting maximum temperature rise on the skin surface were fitted based on the synthetic dataset. All surrogate models were tested on the originally available data where satisfactory predictive performance has been demonstrated. A simple technique of combining quadratic polynomial and tensor-product spline surrogates, each operating on its own cluster of data, has achieved the lowest mean absolute error of 0.058 {\deg}C. Therefore, overall experimental results indicate the validity of the proposed synthetic dataset.

  • 3 authors
·
May 3, 2023

DocXPand-25k: a large and diverse benchmark dataset for identity documents analysis

Identity document (ID) image analysis has become essential for many online services, like bank account opening or insurance subscription. In recent years, much research has been conducted on subjects like document localization, text recognition and fraud detection, to achieve a level of accuracy reliable enough to automatize identity verification. However, there are only a few available datasets to benchmark ID analysis methods, mainly because of privacy restrictions, security requirements and legal reasons. In this paper, we present the DocXPand-25k dataset, which consists of 24,994 richly labeled IDs images, generated using custom-made vectorial templates representing nine fictitious ID designs, including four identity cards, two residence permits and three passports designs. These synthetic IDs feature artificially generated personal information (names, dates, identifiers, faces, barcodes, ...), and present a rich diversity in the visual layouts and textual contents. We collected about 5.8k diverse backgrounds coming from real-world photos, scans and screenshots of IDs to guarantee the variety of the backgrounds. The software we wrote to generate these images has been published (https://github.com/QuickSign/docxpand/) under the terms of the MIT license, and our dataset has been published (https://github.com/QuickSign/docxpand/releases/tag/v1.0.0) under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 License.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 30, 2024

RanLayNet: A Dataset for Document Layout Detection used for Domain Adaptation and Generalization

Large ground-truth datasets and recent advances in deep learning techniques have been useful for layout detection. However, because of the restricted layout diversity of these datasets, training on them requires a sizable number of annotated instances, which is both expensive and time-consuming. As a result, differences between the source and target domains may significantly impact how well these models function. To solve this problem, domain adaptation approaches have been developed that use a small quantity of labeled data to adjust the model to the target domain. In this research, we introduced a synthetic document dataset called RanLayNet, enriched with automatically assigned labels denoting spatial positions, ranges, and types of layout elements. The primary aim of this endeavor is to develop a versatile dataset capable of training models with robustness and adaptability to diverse document formats. Through empirical experimentation, we demonstrate that a deep layout identification model trained on our dataset exhibits enhanced performance compared to a model trained solely on actual documents. Moreover, we conduct a comparative analysis by fine-tuning inference models using both PubLayNet and IIIT-AR-13K datasets on the Doclaynet dataset. Our findings emphasize that models enriched with our dataset are optimal for tasks such as achieving 0.398 and 0.588 mAP95 score in the scientific document domain for the TABLE class.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 15, 2024

Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Personalized Community Question Answering

Personalization in Information Retrieval (IR) is a topic studied by the research community since a long time. However, there is still a lack of datasets to conduct large-scale evaluations of personalized IR; this is mainly due to the fact that collecting and curating high-quality user-related information requires significant costs and time investment. Furthermore, the creation of datasets for Personalized IR (PIR) tasks is affected by both privacy concerns and the need for accurate user-related data, which are often not publicly available. Recently, researchers have started to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets, which is a possible solution to generate data for low-resource tasks. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic documents to train an IR system for a Personalized Community Question Answering task. To study the effectiveness of IR models fine-tuned on LLM-generated data, we introduce a new dataset, named Sy-SE-PQA. We build Sy-SE-PQA based on an existing dataset, SE-PQA, which consists of questions and answers posted on the popular StackExchange communities. Starting from questions in SE-PQA, we generate synthetic answers using different prompt techniques and LLMs. Our findings suggest that LLMs have high potential in generating data tailored to users' needs. The synthetic data can replace human-written training data, even if the generated data may contain incorrect information.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024

OmniWorld: A Multi-Domain and Multi-Modal Dataset for 4D World Modeling

The field of 4D world modeling - aiming to jointly capture spatial geometry and temporal dynamics - has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in large-scale generative models and multimodal learning. However, the development of truly general 4D world models remains fundamentally constrained by the availability of high-quality data. Existing datasets and benchmarks often lack the dynamic complexity, multi-domain diversity, and spatial-temporal annotations required to support key tasks such as 4D geometric reconstruction, future prediction, and camera-control video generation. To address this gap, we introduce OmniWorld, a large-scale, multi-domain, multi-modal dataset specifically designed for 4D world modeling. OmniWorld consists of a newly collected OmniWorld-Game dataset and several curated public datasets spanning diverse domains. Compared with existing synthetic datasets, OmniWorld-Game provides richer modality coverage, larger scale, and more realistic dynamic interactions. Based on this dataset, we establish a challenging benchmark that exposes the limitations of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in modeling complex 4D environments. Moreover, fine-tuning existing SOTA methods on OmniWorld leads to significant performance gains across 4D reconstruction and video generation tasks, strongly validating OmniWorld as a powerful resource for training and evaluation. We envision OmniWorld as a catalyst for accelerating the development of general-purpose 4D world models, ultimately advancing machines' holistic understanding of the physical world.

DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data

Proof assistants like Lean have revolutionized mathematical proof verification, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in mathematical reasoning, their advancement in formal theorem proving is hindered by a lack of training data. To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems. This approach involves translating natural language problems into formal statements, filtering out low-quality statements, and generating proofs to create synthetic data. After fine-tuning the DeepSeekMath 7B model on this synthetic dataset, which comprises 8 million formal statements with proofs, our model achieved whole-proof generation accuracies of 46.3% with 64 samples and 52% cumulatively on the Lean 4 miniF2F test, surpassing the baseline GPT-4 at 23.0% with 64 samples and a tree search reinforcement learning method at 41.0%. Additionally, our model successfully proved 5 out of 148 problems in the Lean 4 Formalized International Mathematical Olympiad (FIMO) benchmark, while GPT-4 failed to prove any. These results demonstrate the potential of leveraging large-scale synthetic data to enhance theorem-proving capabilities in LLMs. Both the synthetic dataset and the model will be made available to facilitate further research in this promising field.

  • 9 authors
·
May 23, 2024 6

Improving Performance, Robustness, and Fairness of Radiographic AI Models with Finely-Controllable Synthetic Data

Achieving robust performance and fairness across diverse patient populations remains a challenge in developing clinically deployable deep learning models for diagnostic imaging. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising strategy to address limitations in dataset scale and diversity. We introduce RoentGen-v2, a text-to-image diffusion model for chest radiographs that enables fine-grained control over both radiographic findings and patient demographic attributes, including sex, age, and race/ethnicity. RoentGen-v2 is the first model to generate clinically plausible images with demographic conditioning, facilitating the creation of a large, demographically balanced synthetic dataset comprising over 565,000 images. We use this large synthetic dataset to evaluate optimal training pipelines for downstream disease classification models. In contrast to prior work that combines real and synthetic data naively, we propose an improved training strategy that leverages synthetic data for supervised pretraining, followed by fine-tuning on real data. Through extensive evaluation on over 137,000 chest radiographs from five institutions, we demonstrate that synthetic pretraining consistently improves model performance, generalization to out-of-distribution settings, and fairness across demographic subgroups. Across datasets, synthetic pretraining led to a 6.5% accuracy increase in the performance of downstream classification models, compared to a modest 2.7% increase when naively combining real and synthetic data. We observe this performance improvement simultaneously with the reduction of the underdiagnosis fairness gap by 19.3%. These results highlight the potential of synthetic imaging to advance equitable and generalizable medical deep learning under real-world data constraints. We open source our code, trained models, and synthetic dataset at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/RoentGen-v2 .

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 22

OpenSWI: A Massive-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Surface Wave Dispersion Curve Inversion

Surface wave dispersion curve inversion plays a critical role in both shallow resource exploration and deep geological studies, yet it remains hindered by sensitivity to initial models and low computational efficiency. Recently, data-driven deep learning methods, inspired by advances in computer vision, have shown promising potential to address these challenges. However, the lack of large-scale, diverse benchmark datasets remains a major obstacle to their development and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we present OpenSWI, a comprehensive benchmark dataset generated through the Surface Wave Inversion Dataset Preparation (SWIDP) pipeline. OpenSWI includes two synthetic datasets tailored to different research scales and scenarios, OpenSWI-shallow and OpenSWI-deep, and an AI-ready real-world dataset for generalization evaluation, OpenSWI-real. OpenSWI-shallow, derived from the 2-D OpenFWI geological model dataset, contains over 22 million 1-D velocity profiles paired with fundamental-mode phase and group velocity dispersion curves, spanning a wide range of shallow geological structures (e.g., flat layers, faults, folds, realistic stratigraphy). OpenSWI-deep, built from 14 global and regional 3-D geological models, comprises 1.26 million high-fidelity 1-D velocity-dispersion pairs for deep-Earth studies. OpenSWI-real, compiled from open-source projects, contains two sets of observed dispersion curves with corresponding reference models, serving as a benchmark for evaluating model generalization. To demonstrate utility, we trained models on OpenSWI-shallow and -deep and evaluated them on OpenSWI-real, demonstrating strong agreement between predictions and references, which confirms the diversity and representativeness of the dataset. To advance intelligent surface wave inversion, we release the SWIDP toolbox, OpenSWI datasets, and trained models for the research community.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 14

Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment

The sharp increase in data-related expenses has motivated research into condensing datasets while retaining the most informative features. Dataset distillation has thus recently come to the fore. This paradigm generates synthetic datasets that are representative enough to replace the original dataset in training a neural network. To avoid redundancy in these synthetic datasets, it is crucial that each element contains unique features and remains diverse from others during the synthesis stage. In this paper, we provide a thorough theoretical and empirical analysis of diversity within synthesized datasets. We argue that enhancing diversity can improve the parallelizable yet isolated synthesizing approach. Specifically, we introduce a novel method that employs dynamic and directed weight adjustment techniques to modulate the synthesis process, thereby maximizing the representativeness and diversity of each synthetic instance. Our method ensures that each batch of synthetic data mirrors the characteristics of a large, varying subset of the original dataset. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, including CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the superior performance of our method, highlighting its effectiveness in producing diverse and representative synthetic datasets with minimal computational expense. Our code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Benchmarking Algorithmic Bias in Face Recognition: An Experimental Approach Using Synthetic Faces and Human Evaluation

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational datasets only permit correlational conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is different on female and male faces in dataset X.". By contrast, experimental methods manipulate attributes individually and thus permit causal conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is affected by gender and skin color." Our method is based on generating synthetic faces using a neural face generator, where each attribute of interest is modified independently while leaving all other attributes constant. Human observers crucially provide the ground truth on perceptual identity similarity between synthetic image pairs. We validate our method quantitatively by evaluating race and gender biases of three research-grade face recognition models. Our synthetic pipeline reveals that for these algorithms, accuracy is lower for Black and East Asian population subgroups. Our method can also quantify how perceptual changes in attributes affect face identity distances reported by these models. Our large synthetic dataset, consisting of 48,000 synthetic face image pairs (10,200 unique synthetic faces) and 555,000 human annotations (individual attributes and pairwise identity comparisons) is available to researchers in this important area.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosis

There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area, an important piece of doctors' interactions with patients is missing in the design of these systems, namely the differential diagnosis. Its absence is largely due to the lack of datasets that include such information for models to train on. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of roughly 1.3 million patients that includes a differential diagnosis, along with the ground truth pathology, symptoms and antecedents for each patient. Unlike existing datasets which only contain binary symptoms and antecedents, this dataset also contains categorical and multi-choice symptoms and antecedents useful for efficient data collection. Moreover, some symptoms are organized in a hierarchy, making it possible to design systems able to interact with patients in a logical way. As a proof-of-concept, we extend two existing AD and ASD systems to incorporate the differential diagnosis, and provide empirical evidence that using differentials as training signals is essential for the efficiency of such systems or for helping doctors better understand the reasoning of those systems.

  • 5 authors
·
May 18, 2022

SafeSynthDP: Leveraging Large Language Models for Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation Using Differential Privacy

Machine learning (ML) models frequently rely on training data that may include sensitive or personal information, raising substantial privacy concerns. Legislative frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have necessitated the development of strategies that preserve privacy while maintaining the utility of data. In this paper, we investigate the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets integrated with Differential Privacy (DP) mechanisms, thereby enabling data-driven research and model training without direct exposure of sensitive information. Our approach incorporates DP-based noise injection methods, including Laplace and Gaussian distributions, into the data generation process. We then evaluate the utility of these DP-enhanced synthetic datasets by comparing the performance of ML models trained on them against models trained on the original data. To substantiate privacy guarantees, we assess the resilience of the generated synthetic data to membership inference attacks and related threats. The experimental results demonstrate that integrating DP within LLM-driven synthetic data generation offers a viable balance between privacy protection and data utility. This study provides a foundational methodology and insight into the privacy-preserving capabilities of LLMs, paving the way for compliant and effective ML research and applications.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 29, 2024

Auditing and Generating Synthetic Data with Controllable Trust Trade-offs

Data collected from the real world tends to be biased, unbalanced, and at risk of exposing sensitive and private information. This reality has given rise to the idea of creating synthetic datasets to alleviate risk, bias, harm, and privacy concerns inherent in the real data. This concept relies on Generative AI models to produce unbiased, privacy-preserving synthetic data while being true to the real data. In this new paradigm, how can we tell if this approach delivers on its promises? We present an auditing framework that offers a holistic assessment of synthetic datasets and AI models trained on them, centered around bias and discrimination prevention, fidelity to the real data, utility, robustness, and privacy preservation. We showcase our framework by auditing multiple generative models on diverse use cases, including education, healthcare, banking, human resources, and across different modalities, from tabular, to time-series, to natural language. Our use cases demonstrate the importance of a holistic assessment in order to ensure compliance with socio-technical safeguards that regulators and policymakers are increasingly enforcing. For this purpose, we introduce the trust index that ranks multiple synthetic datasets based on their prescribed safeguards and their desired trade-offs. Moreover, we devise a trust-index-driven model selection and cross-validation procedure via auditing in the training loop that we showcase on a class of transformer models that we dub TrustFormers, across different modalities. This trust-driven model selection allows for controllable trust trade-offs in the resulting synthetic data. We instrument our auditing framework with workflows that connect different stakeholders from model development to audit and certification via a synthetic data auditing report.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 21, 2023

Toffee: Efficient Million-Scale Dataset Construction for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

In subject-driven text-to-image generation, recent works have achieved superior performance by training the model on synthetic datasets containing numerous image pairs. Trained on these datasets, generative models can produce text-aligned images for specific subject from arbitrary testing image in a zero-shot manner. They even outperform methods which require additional fine-tuning on testing images. However, the cost of creating such datasets is prohibitive for most researchers. To generate a single training pair, current methods fine-tune a pre-trained text-to-image model on the subject image to capture fine-grained details, then use the fine-tuned model to create images for the same subject based on creative text prompts. Consequently, constructing a large-scale dataset with millions of subjects can require hundreds of thousands of GPU hours. To tackle this problem, we propose Toffee, an efficient method to construct datasets for subject-driven editing and generation. Specifically, our dataset construction does not need any subject-level fine-tuning. After pre-training two generative models, we are able to generate infinite number of high-quality samples. We construct the first large-scale dataset for subject-driven image editing and generation, which contains 5 million image pairs, text prompts, and masks. Our dataset is 5 times the size of previous largest dataset, yet our cost is tens of thousands of GPU hours lower. To test the proposed dataset, we also propose a model which is capable of both subject-driven image editing and generation. By simply training the model on our proposed dataset, it obtains competitive results, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset construction framework.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 2

Efficient Dataset Distillation through Alignment with Smooth and High-Quality Expert Trajectories

Training a large and state-of-the-art machine learning model typically necessitates the use of large-scale datasets, which, in turn, makes the training and parameter-tuning process expensive and time-consuming. Some researchers opt to distil information from real-world datasets into tiny and compact synthetic datasets while maintaining their ability to train a well-performing model, hence proposing a data-efficient method known as Dataset Distillation (DD). Despite recent progress in this field, existing methods still underperform and cannot effectively replace large datasets. In this paper, unlike previous methods that focus solely on improving the efficacy of student distillation, we are the first to recognize the important interplay between expert and student. We argue the significant impact of expert smoothness when employing more potent expert trajectories in subsequent dataset distillation. Based on this, we introduce the integration of clipping loss and gradient penalty to regulate the rate of parameter changes in expert trajectories. Furthermore, in response to the sensitivity exhibited towards randomly initialized variables during distillation, we propose representative initialization for synthetic dataset and balanced inner-loop loss. Finally, we present two enhancement strategies, namely intermediate matching loss and weight perturbation, to mitigate the potential occurrence of cumulative errors. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets of different scales, sizes, and resolutions. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

Towards Lossless Dataset Distillation via Difficulty-Aligned Trajectory Matching

The ultimate goal of Dataset Distillation is to synthesize a small synthetic dataset such that a model trained on this synthetic set will perform equally well as a model trained on the full, real dataset. Until now, no method of Dataset Distillation has reached this completely lossless goal, in part due to the fact that previous methods only remain effective when the total number of synthetic samples is extremely small. Since only so much information can be contained in such a small number of samples, it seems that to achieve truly loss dataset distillation, we must develop a distillation method that remains effective as the size of the synthetic dataset grows. In this work, we present such an algorithm and elucidate why existing methods fail to generate larger, high-quality synthetic sets. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on trajectory-matching, or optimizing the synthetic data to induce similar long-term training dynamics as the real data. We empirically find that the training stage of the trajectories we choose to match (i.e., early or late) greatly affects the effectiveness of the distilled dataset. Specifically, early trajectories (where the teacher network learns easy patterns) work well for a low-cardinality synthetic set since there are fewer examples wherein to distribute the necessary information. Conversely, late trajectories (where the teacher network learns hard patterns) provide better signals for larger synthetic sets since there are now enough samples to represent the necessary complex patterns. Based on our findings, we propose to align the difficulty of the generated patterns with the size of the synthetic dataset. In doing so, we successfully scale trajectory matching-based methods to larger synthetic datasets, achieving lossless dataset distillation for the very first time. Code and distilled datasets are available at https://gzyaftermath.github.io/DATM.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

Scaling Laws of Synthetic Data for Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by high-quality web data used in pre-training. However, recent studies indicate this data source is rapidly depleting. Synthetic data emerges as a promising alternative, but it remains unclear whether synthetic datasets exhibit predictable scalability comparable to raw pre-training data. In this work, we systematically investigate the scaling laws of synthetic data by introducing SynthLLM, a scalable framework that transforms pre-training corpora into diverse, high-quality synthetic datasets. Our approach achieves this by automatically extracting and recombining high-level concepts across multiple documents using a graph algorithm. Key findings from our extensive mathematical experiments on SynthLLM include: (1) SynthLLM generates synthetic data that reliably adheres to the rectified scaling law across various model sizes; (2) Performance improvements plateau near 300B tokens; and (3) Larger models approach optimal performance with fewer training tokens. For instance, an 8B model peaks at 1T tokens, while a 3B model requires 4T. Moreover, comparisons with existing synthetic data generation and augmentation methods demonstrate that SynthLLM achieves superior performance and scalability. Our findings highlight synthetic data as a scalable and reliable alternative to organic pre-training corpora, offering a viable path toward continued improvement in model performance.

  • 13 authors
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Mar 25

Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing

Recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated remarkable text-guided image editing capabilities, with systems like GPT-4o and Nano-Banana setting new benchmarks. However, the research community's progress remains constrained by the absence of large-scale, high-quality, and openly accessible datasets built from real images. We introduce Pico-Banana-400K, a comprehensive 400K-image dataset for instruction-based image editing. Our dataset is constructed by leveraging Nano-Banana to generate diverse edit pairs from real photographs in the OpenImages collection. What distinguishes Pico-Banana-400K from previous synthetic datasets is our systematic approach to quality and diversity. We employ a fine-grained image editing taxonomy to ensure comprehensive coverage of edit types while maintaining precise content preservation and instruction faithfulness through MLLM-based quality scoring and careful curation. Beyond single turn editing, Pico-Banana-400K enables research into complex editing scenarios. The dataset includes three specialized subsets: (1) a 72K-example multi-turn collection for studying sequential editing, reasoning, and planning across consecutive modifications; (2) a 56K-example preference subset for alignment research and reward model training; and (3) paired long-short editing instructions for developing instruction rewriting and summarization capabilities. By providing this large-scale, high-quality, and task-rich resource, Pico-Banana-400K establishes a robust foundation for training and benchmarking the next generation of text-guided image editing models.

apple Apple
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Oct 22 2

VideoCAD: A Large-Scale Video Dataset for Learning UI Interactions and 3D Reasoning from CAD Software

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a time-consuming and complex process, requiring precise, long-horizon user interactions with intricate 3D interfaces. While recent advances in AI-driven user interface (UI) agents show promise, most existing datasets and methods focus on short, low-complexity tasks in mobile or web applications, failing to capture the demands of professional engineering tools. In this work, we introduce VideoCAD, the first attempt at engineering UI interaction learning for precision tasks. Specifically, VideoCAD is a large-scale synthetic dataset consisting of over 41K annotated video recordings of CAD operations, generated using an automated framework for collecting high-fidelity UI action data from human-made CAD designs. Compared to existing datasets, VideoCAD offers an order of magnitude higher complexity in UI interaction learning for real-world engineering tasks, having up to a 20x longer time horizon than other datasets. We show two important downstream applications of VideoCAD: learning UI interactions from professional precision 3D CAD tools and a visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models' (LLM) spatial reasoning and video understanding abilities. To learn the UI interactions, we propose VideoCADFormer - a state-of-the-art model in learning CAD interactions directly from video, which outperforms multiple behavior cloning baselines. Both VideoCADFormer and the VQA benchmark derived from VideoCAD reveal key challenges in the current state of video-based UI understanding, including the need for precise action grounding, multi-modal and spatial reasoning, and long-horizon dependencies.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30

Going Beyond Nouns With Vision & Language Models Using Synthetic Data

Large-scale pre-trained Vision & Language (VL) models have shown remarkable performance in many applications, enabling replacing a fixed set of supported classes with zero-shot open vocabulary reasoning over (almost arbitrary) natural language prompts. However, recent works have uncovered a fundamental weakness of these models. For example, their difficulty to understand Visual Language Concepts (VLC) that go 'beyond nouns' such as the meaning of non-object words (e.g., attributes, actions, relations, states, etc.), or difficulty in performing compositional reasoning such as understanding the significance of the order of the words in a sentence. In this work, we investigate to which extent purely synthetic data could be leveraged to teach these models to overcome such shortcomings without compromising their zero-shot capabilities. We contribute Synthetic Visual Concepts (SyViC) - a million-scale synthetic dataset and data generation codebase allowing to generate additional suitable data to improve VLC understanding and compositional reasoning of VL models. Additionally, we propose a general VL finetuning strategy for effectively leveraging SyViC towards achieving these improvements. Our extensive experiments and ablations on VL-Checklist, Winoground, and ARO benchmarks demonstrate that it is possible to adapt strong pre-trained VL models with synthetic data significantly enhancing their VLC understanding (e.g. by 9.9% on ARO and 4.3% on VL-Checklist) with under 1% drop in their zero-shot accuracy.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 30, 2023

The role of synthetic data in Multilingual, Multi-cultural AI systems: Lessons from Indic Languages

Developing AI systems that operate effectively across languages while remaining culturally grounded is a long-standing challenge, particularly in low-resource settings. Synthetic data provides a promising avenue, yet its effectiveness in multilingual and multicultural contexts remains underexplored. We investigate the creation and impact of synthetic, culturally contextualized datasets for Indian languages through a bottom-up generation strategy that prompts large open-source LLMs (>= 235B parameters) to ground data generation in language-specific Wikipedia content. This approach complements the dominant top-down paradigm of translating synthetic datasets from high-resource languages such as English. We introduce Updesh, a high-quality large-scale synthetic instruction-following dataset comprising 9.5M data points across 13 Indian languages, encompassing diverse reasoning and generative tasks with an emphasis on long-context, multi-turn capabilities, and alignment with Indian cultural contexts. A comprehensive evaluation incorporating both automated metrics and human annotation across 10k assessments indicates that generated data is high quality; though, human evaluation highlights areas for further improvement. Additionally, we perform downstream evaluations by fine-tuning models on our dataset and assessing the performance across 15 diverse multilingual datasets. Models trained on Updesh consistently achieve significant gains on generative tasks and remain competitive on multiple-choice style NLU tasks. Notably, relative improvements are most pronounced in low and medium-resource languages, narrowing their gap with high-resource languages. These findings provide empirical evidence that effective multilingual AI requires multi-faceted data curation and generation strategies that incorporate context-aware, culturally grounded methodologies.

microsoft Microsoft
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Sep 25 2

Familiarity: Better Evaluation of Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition by Quantifying Label Shifts in Synthetic Training Data

Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as 'Person' or 'Medicine') without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familiarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024

Grounding Stylistic Domain Generalization with Quantitative Domain Shift Measures and Synthetic Scene Images

Domain Generalization (DG) is a challenging task in machine learning that requires a coherent ability to comprehend shifts across various domains through extraction of domain-invariant features. DG performance is typically evaluated by performing image classification in domains of various image styles. However, current methodology lacks quantitative understanding about shifts in stylistic domain, and relies on a vast amount of pre-training data, such as ImageNet1K, which are predominantly in photo-realistic style with weakly supervised class labels. Such a data-driven practice could potentially result in spurious correlation and inflated performance on DG benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a new DG paradigm to address these risks. We first introduce two new quantitative measures ICV and IDD to describe domain shifts in terms of consistency of classes within one domain and similarity between two stylistic domains. We then present SuperMarioDomains (SMD), a novel synthetic multi-domain dataset sampled from video game scenes with more consistent classes and sufficient dissimilarity compared to ImageNet1K. We demonstrate our DG method SMOS. SMOS first uses SMD to train a precursor model, which is then used to ground the training on a DG benchmark. We observe that SMOS contributes to state-of-the-art performance across five DG benchmarks, gaining large improvements to performances on abstract domains along with on-par or slight improvements to those on photo-realistic domains. Our qualitative analysis suggests that these improvements can be attributed to reduced distributional divergence between originally distant domains. Our data are available at https://github.com/fpsluozi/SMD-SMOS .

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2024

Towards Fair Graph Anomaly Detection: Problem, New Datasets, and Evaluation

The Fair Graph Anomaly Detection (FairGAD) problem aims to accurately detect anomalous nodes in an input graph while ensuring fairness and avoiding biased predictions against individuals from sensitive subgroups such as gender or political leanings. Fairness in graphs is particularly crucial in anomaly detection areas such as misinformation detection in search/ranking systems, where decision outcomes can significantly affect individuals. However, the current literature does not comprehensively discuss this problem, nor does it provide realistic datasets that encompass actual graph structures, anomaly labels, and sensitive attributes for research in FairGAD. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal definition of the FairGAD problem and present two novel graph datasets constructed from the globally prominent social media platforms Reddit and Twitter. These datasets comprise 1.2 million and 400,000 edges associated with 9,000 and 47,000 nodes, respectively, and leverage political leanings as sensitive attributes and misinformation spreaders as anomaly labels. We demonstrate that our FairGAD datasets significantly differ from the synthetic datasets used currently by the research community. These new datasets offer significant values for FairGAD by providing realistic data that captures the intricacies of social networks. Using our datasets, we investigate the performance-fairness trade-off in eleven existing GAD and non-graph AD methods on five state-of-the-art fairness methods, which sheds light on their effectiveness and limitations in addressing the FairGAD problem.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 25, 2024

Synthetic Visual Genome

Reasoning over visual relationships-spatial, functional, interactional, social, etc.-is considered to be a fundamental component of human cognition. Yet, despite the major advances in visual comprehension in multimodal language models (MLMs), precise reasoning over relationships and their generations remains a challenge. We introduce ROBIN: an MLM instruction-tuned with densely annotated relationships capable of constructing high-quality dense scene graphs at scale. To train ROBIN, we curate SVG, a synthetic scene graph dataset by completing the missing relations of selected objects in existing scene graphs using a teacher MLM and a carefully designed filtering process to ensure high-quality. To generate more accurate and rich scene graphs at scale for any image, we introduce SG-EDIT: a self-distillation framework where GPT-4o further refines ROBIN's predicted scene graphs by removing unlikely relations and/or suggesting relevant ones. In total, our dataset contains 146K images and 5.6M relationships for 2.6M objects. Results show that our ROBIN-3B model, despite being trained on less than 3 million instances, outperforms similar-size models trained on over 300 million instances on relationship understanding benchmarks, and even surpasses larger models up to 13B parameters. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in referring expression comprehension with a score of 88.9, surpassing the previous best of 87.4. Our results suggest that training on the refined scene graph data is crucial to maintaining high performance across diverse visual reasoning task.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 9

Minimizing the Accumulated Trajectory Error to Improve Dataset Distillation

Model-based deep learning has achieved astounding successes due in part to the availability of large-scale real-world data. However, processing such massive amounts of data comes at a considerable cost in terms of computations, storage, training and the search for good neural architectures. Dataset distillation has thus recently come to the fore. This paradigm involves distilling information from large real-world datasets into tiny and compact synthetic datasets such that processing the latter ideally yields similar performances as the former. State-of-the-art methods primarily rely on learning the synthetic dataset by matching the gradients obtained during training between the real and synthetic data. However, these gradient-matching methods suffer from the so-called accumulated trajectory error caused by the discrepancy between the distillation and subsequent evaluation. To mitigate the adverse impact of this accumulated trajectory error, we propose a novel approach that encourages the optimization algorithm to seek a flat trajectory. We show that the weights trained on synthetic data are robust against the accumulated errors perturbations with the regularization towards the flat trajectory. Our method, called Flat Trajectory Distillation (FTD), is shown to boost the performance of gradient-matching methods by up to 4.7% on a subset of images of the ImageNet dataset with higher resolution images. We also validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method with datasets of different resolutions and demonstrate its applicability to neural architecture search. Code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/FTD-distillation.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 20, 2022

Harnessing large-language models to generate private synthetic text

Differentially private (DP) training methods like DP-SGD can protect sensitive training data by ensuring that ML models will not reveal private information. An alternative approach, which this paper studies, is to use a sensitive dataset to generate a new synthetic dataset which is differentially private with respect to the original data. Doing so has several advantages: synthetic data can be reused for other tasks (including for hyper parameter tuning), retained indefinitely, or shared with third parties without sacrificing privacy. However, obtaining DP data is much harder than introducing DP during training. To make it feasible for text, recent work has utilized public data by starting with a pre-trained generative language model and privately finetuning it on sensitive data. This model can be used to sample a DP synthetic dataset. While this strategy seems straightforward, executing it has proven problematic. Previous approaches either show significant performance loss, or have, as we show, critical design flaws. In this paper we demonstrate that a proper training objective along with tuning fewer parameters results in excellent DP synthetic data quality. Our approach is competitive with direct DP-training of downstream classifiers in terms of performance on downstream tasks. We also demonstrate that our DP synthetic data is not only useful for downstream classifier training, but also to tune those same models.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

Fidelity and Privacy of Synthetic Medical Data

The digitization of medical records ushered in a new era of big data to clinical science, and with it the possibility that data could be shared, to multiply insights beyond what investigators could abstract from paper records. The need to share individual-level medical data to accelerate innovation in precision medicine continues to grow, and has never been more urgent, as scientists grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, enthusiasm for the use of big data has been tempered by a fully appropriate concern for patient autonomy and privacy. That is, the ability to extract private or confidential information about an individual, in practice, renders it difficult to share data, since significant infrastructure and data governance must be established before data can be shared. Although HIPAA provided de-identification as an approved mechanism for data sharing, linkage attacks were identified as a major vulnerability. A variety of mechanisms have been established to avoid leaking private information, such as field suppression or abstraction, strictly limiting the amount of information that can be shared, or employing mathematical techniques such as differential privacy. Another approach, which we focus on here, is creating synthetic data that mimics the underlying data. For synthetic data to be a useful mechanism in support of medical innovation and a proxy for real-world evidence, one must demonstrate two properties of the synthetic dataset: (1) any analysis on the real data must be matched by analysis of the synthetic data (statistical fidelity) and (2) the synthetic data must preserve privacy, with minimal risk of re-identification (privacy guarantee). In this paper we propose a framework for quantifying the statistical fidelity and privacy preservation properties of synthetic datasets and demonstrate these metrics for synthetic data generated by Syntegra technology.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 18, 2021

Echo-4o: Harnessing the Power of GPT-4o Synthetic Images for Improved Image Generation

Recently, GPT-4o has garnered significant attention for its strong performance in image generation, yet open-source models still lag behind. Several studies have explored distilling image data from GPT-4o to enhance open-source models, achieving notable progress. However, a key question remains: given that real-world image datasets already constitute a natural source of high-quality data, why should we use GPT-4o-generated synthetic data? In this work, we identify two key advantages of synthetic images. First, they can complement rare scenarios in real-world datasets, such as surreal fantasy or multi-reference image generation, which frequently occur in user queries. Second, they provide clean and controllable supervision. Real-world data often contains complex background noise and inherent misalignment between text descriptions and image content, whereas synthetic images offer pure backgrounds and long-tailed supervision signals, facilitating more accurate text-to-image alignment. Building on these insights, we introduce Echo-4o-Image, a 180K-scale synthetic dataset generated by GPT-4o, harnessing the power of synthetic image data to address blind spots in real-world coverage. Using this dataset, we fine-tune the unified multimodal generation baseline Bagel to obtain Echo-4o. In addition, we propose two new evaluation benchmarks for a more accurate and challenging assessment of image generation capabilities: GenEval++, which increases instruction complexity to mitigate score saturation, and Imagine-Bench, which focuses on evaluating both the understanding and generation of imaginative content. Echo-4o demonstrates strong performance across standard benchmarks. Moreover, applying Echo-4o-Image to other foundation models (e.g., OmniGen2, BLIP3-o) yields consistent performance gains across multiple metrics, highlighting the datasets strong transferability.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 13 2

FISBe: A real-world benchmark dataset for instance segmentation of long-range thin filamentous structures

Instance segmentation of neurons in volumetric light microscopy images of nervous systems enables groundbreaking research in neuroscience by facilitating joint functional and morphological analyses of neural circuits at cellular resolution. Yet said multi-neuron light microscopy data exhibits extremely challenging properties for the task of instance segmentation: Individual neurons have long-ranging, thin filamentous and widely branching morphologies, multiple neurons are tightly inter-weaved, and partial volume effects, uneven illumination and noise inherent to light microscopy severely impede local disentangling as well as long-range tracing of individual neurons. These properties reflect a current key challenge in machine learning research, namely to effectively capture long-range dependencies in the data. While respective methodological research is buzzing, to date methods are typically benchmarked on synthetic datasets. To address this gap, we release the FlyLight Instance Segmentation Benchmark (FISBe) dataset, the first publicly available multi-neuron light microscopy dataset with pixel-wise annotations. In addition, we define a set of instance segmentation metrics for benchmarking that we designed to be meaningful with regard to downstream analyses. Lastly, we provide three baselines to kick off a competition that we envision to both advance the field of machine learning regarding methodology for capturing long-range data dependencies, and facilitate scientific discovery in basic neuroscience.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 29, 2024

CIFAKE: Image Classification and Explainable Identification of AI-Generated Synthetic Images

Recent technological advances in synthetic data have enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot tell the difference between real-life photographs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images. Given the critical necessity of data reliability and authentication, this article proposes to enhance our ability to recognise AI-generated images through computer vision. Initially, a synthetic dataset is generated that mirrors the ten classes of the already available CIFAR-10 dataset with latent diffusion which provides a contrasting set of images for comparison to real photographs. The model is capable of generating complex visual attributes, such as photorealistic reflections in water. The two sets of data present as a binary classification problem with regard to whether the photograph is real or generated by AI. This study then proposes the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify the images into two categories; Real or Fake. Following hyperparameter tuning and the training of 36 individual network topologies, the optimal approach could correctly classify the images with 92.98% accuracy. Finally, this study implements explainable AI via Gradient Class Activation Mapping to explore which features within the images are useful for classification. Interpretation reveals interesting concepts within the image, in particular, noting that the actual entity itself does not hold useful information for classification; instead, the model focuses on small visual imperfections in the background of the images. The complete dataset engineered for this study, referred to as the CIFAKE dataset, is made publicly available to the research community for future work.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 24, 2023

Dataset Condensation with Contrastive Signals

Recent studies have demonstrated that gradient matching-based dataset synthesis, or dataset condensation (DC), methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance when applied to data-efficient learning tasks. However, in this study, we prove that the existing DC methods can perform worse than the random selection method when task-irrelevant information forms a significant part of the training dataset. We attribute this to the lack of participation of the contrastive signals between the classes resulting from the class-wise gradient matching strategy. To address this problem, we propose Dataset Condensation with Contrastive signals (DCC) by modifying the loss function to enable the DC methods to effectively capture the differences between classes. In addition, we analyze the new loss function in terms of training dynamics by tracking the kernel velocity. Furthermore, we introduce a bi-level warm-up strategy to stabilize the optimization. Our experimental results indicate that while the existing methods are ineffective for fine-grained image classification tasks, the proposed method can successfully generate informative synthetic datasets for the same tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baselines even on benchmark datasets such as SVHN, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. Finally, we demonstrate the high applicability of the proposed method by applying it to continual learning tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 6, 2022

DataDream: Few-shot Guided Dataset Generation

While text-to-image diffusion models have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art results in image synthesis, they have yet to prove their effectiveness in downstream applications. Previous work has proposed to generate data for image classifier training given limited real data access. However, these methods struggle to generate in-distribution images or depict fine-grained features, thereby hindering the generalization of classification models trained on synthetic datasets. We propose DataDream, a framework for synthesizing classification datasets that more faithfully represents the real data distribution when guided by few-shot examples of the target classes. DataDream fine-tunes LoRA weights for the image generation model on the few real images before generating the training data using the adapted model. We then fine-tune LoRA weights for CLIP using the synthetic data to improve downstream image classification over previous approaches on a large variety of datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of DataDream through extensive experiments, surpassing state-of-the-art classification accuracy with few-shot data across 7 out of 10 datasets, while being competitive on the other 3. Additionally, we provide insights into the impact of various factors, such as the number of real-shot and generated images as well as the fine-tuning compute on model performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/DataDream.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024 2

CodeSense: a Real-World Benchmark and Dataset for Code Semantic Reasoning

Understanding and reasoning about code semantics is essential for enhancing code LLMs' abilities to solve real-world software engineering (SE) tasks. Although several code reasoning benchmarks exist, most rely on synthetic datasets or educational coding problems and focus on coarse-grained reasoning tasks such as input/output prediction, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating LLMs in practical SE contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose CodeSense, the first benchmark that makes available a spectrum of fine-grained code reasoning tasks concerned with the software engineering of real-world code. We collected Python, C and Java software projects from real-world repositories. We executed tests from these repositories, collected their execution traces, and constructed a ground truth dataset for fine-grained semantic reasoning tasks. We then performed comprehensive evaluations on state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results show a clear performance gap for the models to handle fine-grained reasoning tasks. Although prompting techniques such as chain-of-thought and in-context learning helped, the lack of code semantics in LLMs fundamentally limit models' capabilities of code reasoning. Besides dataset, benchmark and evaluation, our work produced an execution tracing framework and tool set that make it easy to collect ground truth for fine-grained SE reasoning tasks, offering a strong basis for future benchmark construction and model post training. Our code and data are located at https://codesense-bench.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
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May 31

Breaking Class Barriers: Efficient Dataset Distillation via Inter-Class Feature Compensator

Dataset distillation has emerged as a technique aiming to condense informative features from large, natural datasets into a compact and synthetic form. While recent advancements have refined this technique, its performance is bottlenecked by the prevailing class-specific synthesis paradigm. Under this paradigm, synthetic data is optimized exclusively for a pre-assigned one-hot label, creating an implicit class barrier in feature condensation. This leads to inefficient utilization of the distillation budget and oversight of inter-class feature distributions, which ultimately limits the effectiveness and efficiency, as demonstrated in our analysis. To overcome these constraints, this paper presents the Inter-class Feature Compensator (INFER), an innovative distillation approach that transcends the class-specific data-label framework widely utilized in current dataset distillation methods. Specifically, INFER leverages a Universal Feature Compensator (UFC) to enhance feature integration across classes, enabling the generation of multiple additional synthetic instances from a single UFC input. This significantly improves the efficiency of the distillation budget. Moreover, INFER enriches inter-class interactions during the distillation, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and generalizability of the distilled data. By allowing for the linear interpolation of labels similar to those in the original dataset, INFER meticulously optimizes the synthetic data and dramatically reduces the size of soft labels in the synthetic dataset to almost zero, establishing a new benchmark for efficiency and effectiveness in dataset distillation.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

Scale Efficient Training for Large Datasets

The rapid growth of dataset scales has been a key driver in advancing deep learning research. However, as dataset scale increases, the training process becomes increasingly inefficient due to the presence of low-value samples, including excessive redundant samples, overly challenging samples, and inefficient easy samples that contribute little to model improvement.To address this challenge, we propose Scale Efficient Training (SeTa) for large datasets, a dynamic sample pruning approach that losslessly reduces training time. To remove low-value samples, SeTa first performs random pruning to eliminate redundant samples, then clusters the remaining samples according to their learning difficulty measured by loss. Building upon this clustering, a sliding window strategy is employed to progressively remove both overly challenging and inefficient easy clusters following an easy-to-hard curriculum.We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale synthetic datasets, including ToCa, SS1M, and ST+MJ, each containing over 3 million samples.SeTa reduces training costs by up to 50\% while maintaining or improving performance, with minimal degradation even at 70\% cost reduction. Furthermore, experiments on various scale real datasets across various backbones (CNNs, Transformers, and Mambas) and diverse tasks (instruction tuning, multi-view stereo, geo-localization, composed image retrieval, referring image segmentation) demonstrate the powerful effectiveness and universality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/mrazhou/SeTa.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 17

Zero-Shot Automatic Annotation and Instance Segmentation using LLM-Generated Datasets: Eliminating Field Imaging and Manual Annotation for Deep Learning Model Development

Currently, deep learning-based instance segmentation for various applications (e.g., Agriculture) is predominantly performed using a labor-intensive process involving extensive field data collection using sophisticated sensors, followed by careful manual annotation of images, presenting significant logistical and financial challenges to researchers and organizations. The process also slows down the model development and training process. In this study, we presented a novel method for deep learning-based instance segmentation of apples in commercial orchards that eliminates the need for labor-intensive field data collection and manual annotation. Utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM), we synthetically generated orchard images and automatically annotated them using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) integrated with a YOLO11 base model. This method significantly reduces reliance on physical sensors and manual data processing, presenting a major advancement in "Agricultural AI". The synthetic, auto-annotated dataset was used to train the YOLO11 model for Apple instance segmentation, which was then validated on real orchard images. The results showed that the automatically generated annotations achieved a Dice Coefficient of 0.9513 and an IoU of 0.9303, validating the accuracy and overlap of the mask annotations. All YOLO11 configurations, trained solely on these synthetic datasets with automated annotations, accurately recognized and delineated apples, highlighting the method's efficacy. Specifically, the YOLO11m-seg configuration achieved a mask precision of 0.902 and a mask mAP@50 of 0.833 on test images collected from a commercial orchard. Additionally, the YOLO11l-seg configuration outperformed other models in validation on 40 LLM-generated images, achieving the highest mask precision and mAP@50 metrics. Keywords: YOLO, SAM, SAMv2, YOLO11, YOLOv11, Segment Anything, YOLO-SAM

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 18, 2024

Everything to the Synthetic: Diffusion-driven Test-time Adaptation via Synthetic-Domain Alignment

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to enhance the performance of source-domain pretrained models when tested on unknown shifted target domains. Traditional TTA methods primarily adapt model weights based on target data streams, making model performance sensitive to the amount and order of target data. Recently, diffusion-driven TTA methods have demonstrated strong performance by using an unconditional diffusion model, which is also trained on the source domain to transform target data into synthetic data as a source domain projection. This allows the source model to make predictions without weight adaptation. In this paper, we argue that the domains of the source model and the synthetic data in diffusion-driven TTA methods are not aligned. To adapt the source model to the synthetic domain of the unconditional diffusion model, we introduce a Synthetic-Domain Alignment (SDA) framework to fine-tune the source model with synthetic data. Specifically, we first employ a conditional diffusion model to generate labeled samples, creating a synthetic dataset. Subsequently, we use the aforementioned unconditional diffusion model to add noise to and denoise each sample before fine-tuning. This process mitigates the potential domain gap between the conditional and unconditional models. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that SDA achieves superior domain alignment and consistently outperforms existing diffusion-driven TTA methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Diffusion-Driven-Test-Time-Adaptation-via-Synthetic-Domain-Alignment.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

A Modular Approach for Clinical SLMs Driven by Synthetic Data with Pre-Instruction Tuning, Model Merging, and Clinical-Tasks Alignment

High computation costs and latency of large language models such as GPT-4 have limited their deployment in clinical settings. Small language models (SLMs) offer a cost-effective alternative, but their limited capacity requires biomedical domain adaptation, which remains challenging. An additional bottleneck is the unavailability and high sensitivity of clinical data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for adapting SLMs into high-performing clinical models. We introduce the MediPhi collection of 3.8B-parameter SLMs developed with our novel framework: pre-instruction tuning of experts on relevant medical and clinical corpora (PMC, Medical Guideline, MedWiki, etc.), model merging, and clinical-tasks alignment. To cover most clinical tasks, we extended the CLUE benchmark to CLUE+, doubling its size. Our expert models deliver relative improvements on this benchmark over the base model without any task-specific fine-tuning: 64.3% on medical entities, 49.5% on radiology reports, and 44% on ICD-10 coding (outperforming GPT-4-0125 by 14%). We unify the expert models into MediPhi via model merging, preserving gains across benchmarks. Furthermore, we built the MediFlow collection, a synthetic dataset of 2.5 million high-quality instructions on 14 medical NLP tasks, 98 fine-grained document types, and JSON format support. Alignment of MediPhi using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization achieves further gains of 18.9% on average.

  • 10 authors
·
May 15 1

Alif: Advancing Urdu Large Language Models via Multilingual Synthetic Data Distillation

Developing a high-performing large language models (LLMs) for low-resource languages such as Urdu, present several challenges. These challenges include the scarcity of high-quality datasets, multilingual inconsistencies, and safety concerns. Existing multilingual LLMs often address these issues by translating large volumes of available data. However, such translations often lack quality and cultural nuance while also incurring significant costs for data curation and training. To address these issues, we propose Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct, a multilingual Urdu-English model, that tackles these challenges with a unique approach. We train the model on a high-quality, multilingual synthetic dataset (Urdu-Instruct), developed using a modified self-instruct technique. By using unique prompts and seed values for each task along with a global task pool, this dataset incorporates Urdu-native chain-of-thought based reasoning, bilingual translation, cultural relevance, and ethical safety alignments. This technique significantly enhances the comprehension of Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct model for Urdu-specific tasks. As a result, Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct, built upon the pretrained Llama-3.1-8B, demonstrates superior performance compared to Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct for Urdu specific-tasks. It also outperformed leading multilingual LLMs, including Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, and Cohere-Aya-Expanse-8B, all within a training budget of under $100. Our results demonstrate that high-performance and low-resource language LLMs can be developed efficiently and culturally aligned using our modified self-instruct approach. All datasets, models, and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/traversaal-ai/alif-urdu-llm.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 10

A Large Scale Search Dataset for Unbiased Learning to Rank

The unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) problem has been greatly advanced by recent deep learning techniques and well-designed debias algorithms. However, promising results on the existing benchmark datasets may not be extended to the practical scenario due to the following disadvantages observed from those popular benchmark datasets: (1) outdated semantic feature extraction where state-of-the-art large scale pre-trained language models like BERT cannot be exploited due to the missing of the original text;(2) incomplete display features for in-depth study of ULTR, e.g., missing the displayed abstract of documents for analyzing the click necessary bias; (3) lacking real-world user feedback, leading to the prevalence of synthetic datasets in the empirical study. To overcome the above disadvantages, we introduce the Baidu-ULTR dataset. It involves randomly sampled 1.2 billion searching sessions and 7,008 expert annotated queries, which is orders of magnitude larger than the existing ones. Baidu-ULTR provides:(1) the original semantic feature and a pre-trained language model for easy usage; (2) sufficient display information such as position, displayed height, and displayed abstract, enabling the comprehensive study of different biases with advanced techniques such as causal discovery and meta-learning; and (3) rich user feedback on search result pages (SERPs) like dwelling time, allowing for user engagement optimization and promoting the exploration of multi-task learning in ULTR. In this paper, we present the design principle of Baidu-ULTR and the performance of benchmark ULTR algorithms on this new data resource, favoring the exploration of ranking for long-tail queries and pre-training tasks for ranking. The Baidu-ULTR dataset and corresponding baseline implementation are available at https://github.com/ChuXiaokai/baidu_ultr_dataset.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 6, 2022

ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and Reasoning

Understanding time series is crucial for its application in real-world scenarios. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly applied to time series tasks, leveraging their strong language capabilities to enhance various applications. However, research on multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for time series understanding and reasoning remains limited, primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets that align time series with textual information. This paper introduces ChatTS, a novel MLLM designed for time series analysis. ChatTS treats time series as a modality, similar to how vision MLLMs process images, enabling it to perform both understanding and reasoning with time series. To address the scarcity of training data, we propose an attribute-based method for generating synthetic time series with detailed attribute descriptions. We further introduce Time Series Evol-Instruct, a novel approach that generates diverse time series Q&As, enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, ChatTS is the first MLLM that takes multivariate time series as input, which is fine-tuned exclusively on synthetic datasets. We evaluate its performance using benchmark datasets with real-world data, including six alignment tasks and four reasoning tasks. Our results show that ChatTS significantly outperforms existing vision-based MLLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) and text/agent-based LLMs, achieving a 46.0% improvement in alignment tasks and a 25.8% improvement in reasoning tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 4, 2024

Multi-V2X: A Large Scale Multi-modal Multi-penetration-rate Dataset for Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to overcome occlusions and enhance long-distance perception. Great achievements have been made in both datasets and algorithms. However, existing real-world datasets are limited by the presence of few communicable agents, while synthetic datasets typically cover only vehicles. More importantly, the penetration rate of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) , a critical factor for the deployment of cooperative perception technologies, has not been adequately addressed. To tackle these issues, we introduce Multi-V2X, a large-scale, multi-modal, multi-penetration-rate dataset for V2X perception. By co-simulating SUMO and CARLA, we equip a substantial number of cars and roadside units (RSUs) in simulated towns with sensor suites, and collect comprehensive sensing data. Datasets with specified CAV penetration rates can be obtained by masking some equipped cars as normal vehicles. In total, our Multi-V2X dataset comprises 549k RGB frames, 146k LiDAR frames, and 4,219k annotated 3D bounding boxes across six categories. The highest possible CAV penetration rate reaches 86.21%, with up to 31 agents in communication range, posing new challenges in selecting agents to collaborate with. We provide comprehensive benchmarks for cooperative 3D object detection tasks. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/RadetzkyLi/Multi-V2X .

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 8, 2024

CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs

We introduce CheXGenBench, a rigorous and multifaceted evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and clinical utility across state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models. Despite rapid advancements in generative AI for real-world imagery, medical domain evaluations have been hindered by methodological inconsistencies, outdated architectural comparisons, and disconnected assessment criteria that rarely address the practical clinical value of synthetic samples. CheXGenBench overcomes these limitations through standardised data partitioning and a unified evaluation protocol comprising over 20 quantitative metrics that systematically analyse generation quality, potential privacy vulnerabilities, and downstream clinical applicability across 11 leading text-to-image architectures. Our results reveal critical inefficiencies in the existing evaluation protocols, particularly in assessing generative fidelity, leading to inconsistent and uninformative comparisons. Our framework establishes a standardised benchmark for the medical AI community, enabling objective and reproducible comparisons while facilitating seamless integration of both existing and future generative models. Additionally, we release a high-quality, synthetic dataset, SynthCheX-75K, comprising 75K radiographs generated by the top-performing model (Sana 0.6B) in our benchmark to support further research in this critical domain. Through CheXGenBench, we establish a new state-of-the-art and release our framework, models, and SynthCheX-75K dataset at https://raman1121.github.io/CheXGenBench/

  • 6 authors
·
May 15 2

The Change You Want To Detect: Semantic Change Detection In Earth Observation With Hybrid Data Generation

Bi-temporal change detection at scale based on Very High Resolution (VHR) images is crucial for Earth monitoring. This remains poorly addressed so far: methods either require large volumes of annotated data (semantic case), or are limited to restricted datasets (binary set-ups). Most approaches do not exhibit the versatility required for temporal and spatial adaptation: simplicity in architecture design and pretraining on realistic and comprehensive datasets. Synthetic datasets are the key solution but still fail to handle complex and diverse scenes. In this paper, we present HySCDG a generative pipeline for creating a large hybrid semantic change detection dataset that contains both real VHR images and inpainted ones, along with land cover semantic map at both dates and the change map. Being semantically and spatially guided, HySCDG generates realistic images, leading to a comprehensive and hybrid transfer-proof dataset FSC-180k. We evaluate FSC-180k on five change detection cases (binary and semantic), from zero-shot to mixed and sequential training, and also under low data regime training. Experiments demonstrate that pretraining on our hybrid dataset leads to a significant performance boost, outperforming SyntheWorld, a fully synthetic dataset, in every configuration. All codes, models, and data are available here: https://yb23.github.io/projects/cywd/

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19

PsOCR: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Optical Character Recognition in Low-resource Pashto Language

This paper evaluates the performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the low-resource Pashto language. Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Pashto faces several challenges due to the cursive nature of its script and a scarcity of structured datasets. To address this, we developed a synthetic Pashto OCR dataset, PsOCR, consisting of one million images annotated with bounding boxes at word, line, and document levels, suitable for training and evaluating models based on different architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers. PsOCR covers variations across 1,000 unique font families, colors, image sizes, and layouts. A benchmark subset of 10K images was selected to evaluate the performance of several LMMs, including seven open-source models: DeepSeek's Janus, InternVL, MiniCPM, Florence, and Qwen (3B and 7B), and four closed-source models: GPT-4o, Gemini, Claude, and Grok. Experimental results demonstrate that Gemini achieves the best performance among all models, whereas among open-source models, Qwen-7B stands out. This work provides an insightful assessment of the capabilities and limitations of current LMMs for OCR tasks in Pashto and establishes a foundation for further research not only in Pashto OCR but also for other similar scripts such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. PsOCR is available at https://github.com/zirak-ai/PashtoOCR.

  • 3 authors
·
May 15

Mellow: a small audio language model for reasoning

Multimodal Audio-Language Models (ALMs) can understand and reason over both audio and text. Typically, reasoning performance correlates with model size, with the best results achieved by models exceeding 8 billion parameters. However, no prior work has explored enabling small audio-language models to perform reasoning tasks, despite the potential applications for edge devices. To address this gap, we introduce Mellow, a small Audio-Language Model specifically designed for reasoning. Mellow achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing small audio-language models and surpasses several larger models in reasoning capabilities. For instance, Mellow scores 52.11 on MMAU, comparable to SoTA Qwen2 Audio (which scores 52.5) while using 50 times fewer parameters and being trained on 60 times less data (audio hrs). To train Mellow, we introduce ReasonAQA, a dataset designed to enhance audio-grounded reasoning in models. It consists of a mixture of existing datasets (30% of the data) and synthetically generated data (70%). The synthetic dataset is derived from audio captioning datasets, where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate detailed and multiple-choice questions focusing on audio events, objects, acoustic scenes, signal properties, semantics, and listener emotions. To evaluate Mellow's reasoning ability, we benchmark it on a diverse set of tasks, assessing on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data, including audio understanding, deductive reasoning, and comparative reasoning. Finally, we conduct extensive ablation studies to explore the impact of projection layer choices, synthetic data generation methods, and language model pretraining on reasoning performance. Our training dataset, findings, and baseline pave the way for developing small ALMs capable of reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 11

Self-supervised Learning to Bring Dual Reversed Rolling Shutter Images Alive

Modern consumer cameras usually employ the rolling shutter (RS) mechanism, where images are captured by scanning scenes row-by-row, yielding RS distortions for dynamic scenes. To correct RS distortions, existing methods adopt a fully supervised learning manner, where high framerate global shutter (GS) images should be collected as ground-truth supervision. In this paper, we propose a Self-supervised learning framework for Dual reversed RS distortions Correction (SelfDRSC), where a DRSC network can be learned to generate a high framerate GS video only based on dual RS images with reversed distortions. In particular, a bidirectional distortion warping module is proposed for reconstructing dual reversed RS images, and then a self-supervised loss can be deployed to train DRSC network by enhancing the cycle consistency between input and reconstructed dual reversed RS images. Besides start and end RS scanning time, GS images at arbitrary intermediate scanning time can also be supervised in SelfDRSC, thus enabling the learned DRSC network to generate a high framerate GS video. Moreover, a simple yet effective self-distillation strategy is introduced in self-supervised loss for mitigating boundary artifacts in generated GS images. On synthetic dataset, SelfDRSC achieves better or comparable quantitative metrics in comparison to state-of-the-art methods trained in the full supervision manner. On real-world RS cases, our SelfDRSC can produce high framerate GS videos with finer correction textures and better temporary consistency. The source code and trained models are made publicly available at https://github.com/shangwei5/SelfDRSC.

  • 6 authors
·
May 31, 2023

SonicSim: A customizable simulation platform for speech processing in moving sound source scenarios

The systematic evaluation of speech separation and enhancement models under moving sound source conditions typically requires extensive data comprising diverse scenarios. However, real-world datasets often contain insufficient data to meet the training and evaluation requirements of models. Although synthetic datasets offer a larger volume of data, their acoustic simulations lack realism. Consequently, neither real-world nor synthetic datasets effectively fulfill practical needs. To address these issues, we introduce SonicSim, a synthetic toolkit de-designed to generate highly customizable data for moving sound sources. SonicSim is developed based on the embodied AI simulation platform, Habitat-sim, supporting multi-level adjustments, including scene-level, microphone-level, and source-level, thereby generating more diverse synthetic data. Leveraging SonicSim, we constructed a moving sound source benchmark dataset, SonicSet, using the Librispeech, the Freesound Dataset 50k (FSD50K) and Free Music Archive (FMA), and 90 scenes from the Matterport3D to evaluate speech separation and enhancement models. Additionally, to validate the differences between synthetic data and real-world data, we randomly selected 5 hours of raw data without reverberation from the SonicSet validation set to record a real-world speech separation dataset, which was then compared with the corresponding synthetic datasets. Similarly, we utilized the real-world speech enhancement dataset RealMAN to validate the acoustic gap between other synthetic datasets and the SonicSet dataset for speech enhancement. The results indicate that the synthetic data generated by SonicSim can effectively generalize to real-world scenarios. Demo and code are publicly available at https://cslikai.cn/SonicSim/.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 2

ClaraVid: A Holistic Scene Reconstruction Benchmark From Aerial Perspective With Delentropy-Based Complexity Profiling

The development of aerial holistic scene understanding algorithms is hindered by the scarcity of comprehensive datasets that enable both semantic and geometric reconstruction. While synthetic datasets offer an alternative, existing options exhibit task-specific limitations, unrealistic scene compositions, and rendering artifacts that compromise real-world applicability. We introduce ClaraVid, a synthetic aerial dataset specifically designed to overcome these limitations. Comprising 16,917 high-resolution images captured at 4032x3024 from multiple viewpoints across diverse landscapes, ClaraVid provides dense depth maps, panoptic segmentation, sparse point clouds, and dynamic object masks, while mitigating common rendering artifacts. To further advance neural reconstruction, we introduce the Delentropic Scene Profile (DSP), a novel complexity metric derived from differential entropy analysis, designed to quantitatively assess scene difficulty and inform reconstruction tasks. Utilizing DSP, we systematically benchmark neural reconstruction methods, uncovering a consistent, measurable correlation between scene complexity and reconstruction accuracy. Empirical results indicate that higher delentropy strongly correlates with increased reconstruction errors, validating DSP as a reliable complexity prior. Currently under review, upon acceptance the data and code will be available at https://rdbch.github.io/claravid{rdbch.github.io/ClaraVid}.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 22

AutoSynth: Learning to Generate 3D Training Data for Object Point Cloud Registration

In the current deep learning paradigm, the amount and quality of training data are as critical as the network architecture and its training details. However, collecting, processing, and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly for tasks such as 3D object registration. While synthetic datasets can be created, they require expertise to design and include a limited number of categories. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called AutoSynth, which automatically generates 3D training data for point cloud registration. Specifically, AutoSynth automatically curates an optimal dataset by exploring a search space encompassing millions of potential datasets with diverse 3D shapes at a low cost.To achieve this, we generate synthetic 3D datasets by assembling shape primitives, and develop a meta-learning strategy to search for the best training data for 3D registration on real point clouds. For this search to remain tractable, we replace the point cloud registration network with a much smaller surrogate network, leading to a 4056.43 times speedup. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by implementing it with two different point cloud registration networks, BPNet and IDAM. Our results on TUD-L, LINEMOD and Occluded-LINEMOD evidence that a neural network trained on our searched dataset yields consistently better performance than the same one trained on the widely used ModelNet40 dataset.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023

Data Factors for Better Compositional Generalization

Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization, such as SCAN (Lake and Baroni, 2018) and COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020), expose severe problems in models trained from scratch on these datasets. However, in contrast to this poor performance, state-of-the-art models trained on larger and more general datasets show better generalization ability. In this work, to reconcile this inconsistency, we conduct an empirical analysis by training Transformer models on a variety of training sets with different data factors, including dataset scale, pattern complexity, example difficulty, etc. First, we show that increased dataset complexity can lead to better generalization behavior on multiple different generalization challenges. To further understand this improvement, we show two axes of the benefit from more complex datasets: they provide more diverse examples so compositional understanding becomes more effective, and they also prevent ungeneralizable memorization of the examples due to reduced example repetition frequency. Finally, we explore how training examples of different difficulty levels influence generalization differently. On synthetic datasets, simple examples invoke stronger compositionality than hard examples do. On larger-scale real language datasets, while hard examples become more important potentially to ensure decent data coverage, a balanced mixture of simple and hard examples manages to induce the strongest generalizability. The code and data for this work are available at https://github.com/owenzx/data4comp

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 7, 2023

PlotQA: Reasoning over Scientific Plots

Existing synthetic datasets (FigureQA, DVQA) for reasoning over plots do not contain variability in data labels, real-valued data, or complex reasoning questions. Consequently, proposed models for these datasets do not fully address the challenge of reasoning over plots. In particular, they assume that the answer comes either from a small fixed size vocabulary or from a bounding box within the image. However, in practice, this is an unrealistic assumption because many questions require reasoning and thus have real-valued answers which appear neither in a small fixed size vocabulary nor in the image. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap between existing datasets and real-world plots. Specifically, we propose PlotQA with 28.9 million question-answer pairs over 224,377 plots on data from real-world sources and questions based on crowd-sourced question templates. Further, 80.76% of the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) questions in PlotQA have answers that are not in a fixed vocabulary. Analysis of existing models on PlotQA reveals that they cannot deal with OOV questions: their overall accuracy on our dataset is in single digits. This is not surprising given that these models were not designed for such questions. As a step towards a more holistic model which can address fixed vocabulary as well as OOV questions, we propose a hybrid approach: Specific questions are answered by choosing the answer from a fixed vocabulary or by extracting it from a predicted bounding box in the plot, while other questions are answered with a table question-answering engine which is fed with a structured table generated by detecting visual elements from the image. On the existing DVQA dataset, our model has an accuracy of 58%, significantly improving on the highest reported accuracy of 46%. On PlotQA, our model has an accuracy of 22.52%, which is significantly better than state of the art models.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 3, 2019

StyleMe3D: Stylization with Disentangled Priors by Multiple Encoders on 3D Gaussians

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels in photorealistic scene reconstruction but struggles with stylized scenarios (e.g., cartoons, games) due to fragmented textures, semantic misalignment, and limited adaptability to abstract aesthetics. We propose StyleMe3D, a holistic framework for 3D GS style transfer that integrates multi-modal style conditioning, multi-level semantic alignment, and perceptual quality enhancement. Our key insights include: (1) optimizing only RGB attributes preserves geometric integrity during stylization; (2) disentangling low-, medium-, and high-level semantics is critical for coherent style transfer; (3) scalability across isolated objects and complex scenes is essential for practical deployment. StyleMe3D introduces four novel components: Dynamic Style Score Distillation (DSSD), leveraging Stable Diffusion's latent space for semantic alignment; Contrastive Style Descriptor (CSD) for localized, content-aware texture transfer; Simultaneously Optimized Scale (SOS) to decouple style details and structural coherence; and 3D Gaussian Quality Assessment (3DG-QA), a differentiable aesthetic prior trained on human-rated data to suppress artifacts and enhance visual harmony. Evaluated on NeRF synthetic dataset (objects) and tandt db (scenes) datasets, StyleMe3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods in preserving geometric details (e.g., carvings on sculptures) and ensuring stylistic consistency across scenes (e.g., coherent lighting in landscapes), while maintaining real-time rendering. This work bridges photorealistic 3D GS and artistic stylization, unlocking applications in gaming, virtual worlds, and digital art.

  • 10 authors
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Apr 21 2

Futga: Towards Fine-grained Music Understanding through Temporally-enhanced Generative Augmentation

Existing music captioning methods are limited to generating concise global descriptions of short music clips, which fail to capture fine-grained musical characteristics and time-aware musical changes. To address these limitations, we propose FUTGA, a model equipped with fined-grained music understanding capabilities through learning from generative augmentation with temporal compositions. We leverage existing music caption datasets and large language models (LLMs) to synthesize fine-grained music captions with structural descriptions and time boundaries for full-length songs. Augmented by the proposed synthetic dataset, FUTGA is enabled to identify the music's temporal changes at key transition points and their musical functions, as well as generate detailed descriptions for each music segment. We further introduce a full-length music caption dataset generated by FUTGA, as the augmentation of the MusicCaps and the Song Describer datasets. We evaluate the automatically generated captions on several downstream tasks, including music generation and retrieval. The experiments demonstrate the quality of the generated captions and the better performance in various downstream tasks achieved by the proposed music captioning approach. Our code and datasets can be found in https://huggingface.co/JoshuaW1997/FUTGA{blue{https://huggingface.co/JoshuaW1997/FUTGA}}.

  • 8 authors
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Jul 29, 2024 3

LightGen: Efficient Image Generation through Knowledge Distillation and Direct Preference Optimization

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have primarily relied on extensive datasets and parameter-heavy architectures. These requirements severely limit accessibility for researchers and practitioners who lack substantial computational resources. In this paper, we introduce \model, an efficient training paradigm for image generation models that uses knowledge distillation (KD) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Drawing inspiration from the success of data KD techniques widely adopted in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), LightGen distills knowledge from state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-image models into a compact Masked Autoregressive (MAR) architecture with only 0.7B parameters. Using a compact synthetic dataset of just 2M high-quality images generated from varied captions, we demonstrate that data diversity significantly outweighs data volume in determining model performance. This strategy dramatically reduces computational demands and reduces pre-training time from potentially thousands of GPU-days to merely 88 GPU-days. Furthermore, to address the inherent shortcomings of synthetic data, particularly poor high-frequency details and spatial inaccuracies, we integrate the DPO technique that refines image fidelity and positional accuracy. Comprehensive experiments confirm that LightGen achieves image generation quality comparable to SOTA models while significantly reducing computational resources and expanding accessibility for resource-constrained environments. Code is available at https://github.com/XianfengWu01/LightGen

  • 11 authors
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Mar 11 2

$\textit{Trans-LoRA}$: towards data-free Transferable Parameter Efficient Finetuning

Low-rank adapters (LoRA) and their variants are popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques that closely match full model fine-tune performance while requiring only a small number of additional parameters. These additional LoRA parameters are specific to the base model being adapted. When the base model needs to be deprecated and replaced with a new one, all the associated LoRA modules need to be re-trained. Such re-training requires access to the data used to train the LoRA for the original base model. This is especially problematic for commercial cloud applications where the LoRA modules and the base models are hosted by service providers who may not be allowed to host proprietary client task data. To address this challenge, we propose Trans-LoRA -- a novel method for lossless, nearly data-free transfer of LoRAs across base models. Our approach relies on synthetic data to transfer LoRA modules. Using large language models, we design a synthetic data generator to approximate the data-generating process of the observed task data subset. Training on the resulting synthetic dataset transfers LoRA modules to new models. We show the effectiveness of our approach using both LLama and Gemma model families. Our approach achieves lossless (mostly improved) LoRA transfer between models within and across different base model families, and even between different PEFT methods, on a wide variety of tasks.

  • 7 authors
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May 27, 2024

Voice Cloning for Dysarthric Speech Synthesis: Addressing Data Scarcity in Speech-Language Pathology

This study explores voice cloning to generate synthetic speech replicating the unique patterns of individuals with dysarthria. Using the TORGO dataset, we address data scarcity and privacy challenges in speech-language pathology. Our contributions include demonstrating that voice cloning preserves dysarthric speech characteristics, analyzing differences between real and synthetic data, and discussing implications for diagnostics, rehabilitation, and communication. We cloned voices from dysarthric and control speakers using a commercial platform, ensuring gender-matched synthetic voices. A licensed speech-language pathologist (SLP) evaluated a subset for dysarthria, speaker gender, and synthetic indicators. The SLP correctly identified dysarthria in all cases and speaker gender in 95% but misclassified 30% of synthetic samples as real, indicating high realism. Our results suggest synthetic speech effectively captures disordered characteristics and that voice cloning has advanced to produce high-quality data resembling real speech, even to trained professionals. This has critical implications for healthcare, where synthetic data can mitigate data scarcity, protect privacy, and enhance AI-driven diagnostics. By enabling the creation of diverse, high-quality speech datasets, voice cloning can improve generalizable models, personalize therapy, and advance assistive technologies for dysarthria. We publicly release our synthetic dataset to foster further research and collaboration, aiming to develop robust models that improve patient outcomes in speech-language pathology.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 3 1

UltraPose: Synthesizing Dense Pose with 1 Billion Points by Human-body Decoupling 3D Model

Recovering dense human poses from images plays a critical role in establishing an image-to-surface correspondence between RGB images and the 3D surface of the human body, serving the foundation of rich real-world applications, such as virtual humans, monocular-to-3d reconstruction. However, the popular DensePose-COCO dataset relies on a sophisticated manual annotation system, leading to severe limitations in acquiring the denser and more accurate annotated pose resources. In this work, we introduce a new 3D human-body model with a series of decoupled parameters that could freely control the generation of the body. Furthermore, we build a data generation system based on this decoupling 3D model, and construct an ultra dense synthetic benchmark UltraPose, containing around 1.3 billion corresponding points. Compared to the existing manually annotated DensePose-COCO dataset, the synthetic UltraPose has ultra dense image-to-surface correspondences without annotation cost and error. Our proposed UltraPose provides the largest benchmark and data resources for lifting the model capability in predicting more accurate dense poses. To promote future researches in this field, we also propose a transformer-based method to model the dense correspondence between 2D and 3D worlds. The proposed model trained on synthetic UltraPose can be applied to real-world scenarios, indicating the effectiveness of our benchmark and model.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 28, 2021

DomainMix: Learning Generalizable Person Re-Identification Without Human Annotations

Existing person re-identification models often have low generalizability, which is mostly due to limited availability of large-scale labeled data in training. However, labeling large-scale training data is very expensive and time-consuming, while large-scale synthetic dataset shows promising value in learning generalizable person re-identification models. Therefore, in this paper a novel and practical person re-identification task is proposed,i.e. how to use labeled synthetic dataset and unlabeled real-world dataset to train a universal model. In this way, human annotations are no longer required, and it is scalable to large and diverse real-world datasets. To address the task, we introduce a framework with high generalizability, namely DomainMix. Specifically, the proposed method firstly clusters the unlabeled real-world images and selects the reliable clusters. During training, to address the large domain gap between two domains, a domain-invariant feature learning method is proposed, which introduces a new loss,i.e. domain balance loss, to conduct an adversarial learning between domain-invariant feature learning and domain discrimination, and meanwhile learns a discriminative feature for person re-identification. This way, the domain gap between synthetic and real-world data is much reduced, and the learned feature is generalizable thanks to the large-scale and diverse training data. Experimental results show that the proposed annotation-free method is more or less comparable to the counterpart trained with full human annotations, which is quite promising. In addition, it achieves the current state of the art on several person re-identification datasets under direct cross-dataset evaluation.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 24, 2020

HRScene: How Far Are VLMs from Effective High-Resolution Image Understanding?

High-resolution image (HRI) understanding aims to process images with a large number of pixels, such as pathological images and agricultural aerial images, both of which can exceed 1 million pixels. Vision Large Language Models (VLMs) can allegedly handle HRIs, however, there is a lack of a comprehensive benchmark for VLMs to evaluate HRI understanding. To address this gap, we introduce HRScene, a novel unified benchmark for HRI understanding with rich scenes. HRScene incorporates 25 real-world datasets and 2 synthetic diagnostic datasets with resolutions ranging from 1,024 times 1,024 to 35,503 times 26,627. HRScene is collected and re-annotated by 10 graduate-level annotators, covering 25 scenarios, ranging from microscopic to radiology images, street views, long-range pictures, and telescope images. It includes HRIs of real-world objects, scanned documents, and composite multi-image. The two diagnostic evaluation datasets are synthesized by combining the target image with the gold answer and distracting images in different orders, assessing how well models utilize regions in HRI. We conduct extensive experiments involving 28 VLMs, including Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o. Experiments on HRScene show that current VLMs achieve an average accuracy of around 50% on real-world tasks, revealing significant gaps in HRI understanding. Results on synthetic datasets reveal that VLMs struggle to effectively utilize HRI regions, showing significant Regional Divergence and lost-in-middle, shedding light on future research.

  • 17 authors
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Apr 25

GARF: Learning Generalizable 3D Reassembly for Real-World Fractures

3D reassembly is a challenging spatial intelligence task with broad applications across scientific domains. While large-scale synthetic datasets have fueled promising learning-based approaches, their generalizability to different domains is limited. Critically, it remains uncertain whether models trained on synthetic datasets can generalize to real-world fractures where breakage patterns are more complex. To bridge this gap, we propose GARF, a generalizable 3D reassembly framework for real-world fractures. GARF leverages fracture-aware pretraining to learn fracture features from individual fragments, with flow matching enabling precise 6-DoF alignments. At inference time, we introduce one-step preassembly, improving robustness to unseen objects and varying numbers of fractures. In collaboration with archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and ornithologists, we curate Fractura, a diverse dataset for vision and learning communities, featuring real-world fracture types across ceramics, bones, eggshells, and lithics. Comprehensive experiments have shown our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, achieving 82.87\% lower rotation error and 25.15\% higher part accuracy. This sheds light on training on synthetic data to advance real-world 3D puzzle solving, demonstrating its strong generalization across unseen object shapes and diverse fracture types.

  • 12 authors
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Apr 7

NetInfoF Framework: Measuring and Exploiting Network Usable Information

Given a node-attributed graph, and a graph task (link prediction or node classification), can we tell if a graph neural network (GNN) will perform well? More specifically, do the graph structure and the node features carry enough usable information for the task? Our goals are (1) to develop a fast tool to measure how much information is in the graph structure and in the node features, and (2) to exploit the information to solve the task, if there is enough. We propose NetInfoF, a framework including NetInfoF_Probe and NetInfoF_Act, for the measurement and the exploitation of network usable information (NUI), respectively. Given a graph data, NetInfoF_Probe measures NUI without any model training, and NetInfoF_Act solves link prediction and node classification, while two modules share the same backbone. In summary, NetInfoF has following notable advantages: (a) General, handling both link prediction and node classification; (b) Principled, with theoretical guarantee and closed-form solution; (c) Effective, thanks to the proposed adjustment to node similarity; (d) Scalable, scaling linearly with the input size. In our carefully designed synthetic datasets, NetInfoF correctly identifies the ground truth of NUI and is the only method being robust to all graph scenarios. Applied on real-world datasets, NetInfoF wins in 11 out of 12 times on link prediction compared to general GNN baselines.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 12, 2024