Overview

Synthetic data generation studies how to create artificial examples that reproduce useful features of real data or provide exact, controllable labels. Common approaches include procedural simulators and domain randomization, generative models such as GANs, variational autoencoders and diffusion models, and large language models or agents that synthesize text, dialogues, and tool-use trajectories. These methods are used to address scarce or sensitive data, cover rare cases, and build controlled training and evaluation sets, with quality often measured by fidelity, privacy, downstream performance, and transfer to real benchmarks. A central open tension is that realism or strong benchmark scores do not guarantee representative, unbiased, causally valid data or reliable performance in real settings.

Latest papers

629 papers69 papers in the last four weeks, up 1% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

May 7, 2026

When2Speak: A Dataset for Temporal Participation and Turn-Taking in Multi-Party Conversations for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating contextually appropriate responses but remain poorly calibrated for multi-party conversations, where deciding when to speak is as critical as what to say. In such settings, naively responding at every turn leads to excessive interruptions and degraded conversational coherence. We introduce When2Speak, a grounded synthetic dataset and four-stage generation pipeline for learning intervention timing in group interactions. The dataset comprises over 215,000 examples derived from 16,000 conversations involving 2-6 speakers, spanning diverse conversational styles, tones, and participant dynamics, and explicitly modeling SPEAK vs. SILENT decisions at each turn. Our pipeline combines real-world grounding, structured augmentation, controlled transcript synthesis, and fine-tuning-ready supervision, and is fully open-sourced to support reproducibility and adaptation to domain-specific conversational norms. Across multiple model families, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on When2Speak significantly outperforms zero-shot baselines (e.g., the average Macro F1 increase across 4B+ parameter models was 60%, with the largest increase being 120%). However, SFT-trained models remain systematically over-conservative, missing nearly half of warranted interventions as seen through the Missed Intervention Rate (MIR), which was on average 0.50 and is noticed even at larger model sizes. To address this limitation, we apply reinforcement learning with asymmetric reward shaping, which reduces MIR to 0.186-0.218 and increases recall from 0.479 to 0.78-0.81. Our findings establish that temporal participation is a distinct and trainable dimension of conversational intelligence, and that grounded synthetic data provides an effective and scalable pathway for enabling LLMs to participate more naturally and appropriately in multi-party interactions.
May 6, 2026

Generating Query-Focused Summarization Datasets from Query-Free Summarization Datasets

Large-scale datasets are widely used to perform summarization tasks, but they may not include queries alongside documents and summaries. In the search for suitable datasets for Query-Focused Summarization (QFS), we identify two research questions: Is it possible to automatically generate evidence-based query keywords from query-free datasets? Does evidence-based query generation support the QFS task? This paper proposes an evidence-based model to generate queries from query-free datasets. To evaluate our model intrinsically, we compare the similarity between the original queries and the system-generated queries of two QFS datasets. We also perform summarization tasks using different pre-trained models, as well as a state-of-the-art (SOTA) QFS model, to measure the extrinsic performance of our query generation approach. Experimental results indicate that summaries generated using evidence-based queries achieve competitive ROUGE scores compared to those generated from the original queries.
May 6, 2026

Syn4D: A Multiview Synthetic 4D Dataset

Dense 3D reconstruction and tracking of dynamic scenes from monocular video remains an important open challenge in computer vision. Progress in this area has been constrained by the scarcity of high-quality datasets with dense, complete, and accurate geometric annotations. To address this limitation, we introduce Syn4D, a multiview synthetic dataset of dynamic scenes that includes ground-truth camera motion, depth maps, dense tracking, and parametric human pose annotations. A key feature of Syn4D is the ability to unproject any pixel into 3D to any time and to any camera. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks to demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed dataset, including 4D scene reconstruction, 3D point tracking, geometry-aware camera retargeting, and human pose estimation. The experimental results highlight Syn4D's potential to facilitate research in dynamic scene understanding and spatiotemporal modeling.
May 5, 2026

Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems

Reasoning-intensive retrieval aims to surface evidence that supports downstream reasoning rather than merely matching topical similarity. This capability is increasingly important for agentic search systems, where retrievers must provide complementary evidence across iterative search and synthesis. However, existing work remains limited on both evaluation and training: benchmarks such as BRIGHT provide narrow gold sets and evaluate retrievers in isolation, while synthetic training corpora often optimize single-passage relevance rather than evidence portfolio construction. We introduce BRIGHT-Pro, an expert-annotated benchmark that expands each query with multi-aspect gold evidence and evaluates retrievers under both static and agentic search protocols. We further construct RTriever-Synth, an aspect-decomposed synthetic corpus that generates complementary positives and positive-conditioned hard negatives, and use it to LoRA fine-tune RTriever-4B from Qwen3-Embedding-4B. Experiments across lexical, general-purpose, and reasoning-intensive retrievers show that aspect-aware and agentic evaluation expose behaviors hidden by standard metrics, while RTriever-4B substantially improves over its base model.
May 3, 2026

From Concept to Capability: Evaluating 3D Gaussian Splatting for Synthetic Scene Editing in Autonomous Driving

The perception of an Autonomous Driving System (ADS) critically depends on relevant, comprehensive, and diverse datasets to ensure its safety while operating in the environment. Field data collection lacks completeness with respect to the list of rare but still possible safety-related scenarios needed for the development, verification, and validation of the ADS. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown promising capabilities for the reconstruction and editing of scenes based on data collected by cameras and LiDAR sensors. However, the industrial fidelity evaluation of reconstructions is underexplored, which is crucial when employing such methods in safety-related systems, especially for ADS. This becomes more challenging as ADS operates in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment with limited viewpoints and often partially occluded objects. This paper addresses this gap by proposing and implementing a framework (Fig. 1) to systematically analyze the capabilities and limitations of 3DGS for use in the reconstruction of safety-related scenes. It focuses on the quality of reconstruction for vehicles and pedestrians, which are the two most critical object classes for ADS. Our findings provide industry insights into the fidelity degradation of reconstructions from multiple novel viewpoints, both lateral and longitudinal, enabling the integration of these methods into real-world industrial AD software development and testing pipelines.
May 3, 2026

Skipping the Zeros in Diffusion Models for Sparse Data Generation

Diffusion models (DMs) excel on dense continuous data, but are not designed for sparse continuous data. They do not model exact zeros that represent the deliberate absence of a signal. As a result, they erase sparsity patterns and perform unnecessary computation on mostly zero entries. With Sparsity-Exploiting Diffusion (SED), we model only non-zero values, preserving sparsity. SED delivers computational savings while maintaining or improving generation quality by skipping zeros during training and inference. Across physics and biology benchmarks, SED matches or surpasses conventional DMs and domain-specific baselines, while vision experiments provide intuitive insights into the limitations of dense DMs and the benefits of SED.
May 3, 2026

DataEvolver: Let Your Data Build and Improve Itself via Goal-Driven Loop Agents

Constructing controllable visual data is a major bottleneck for image editing and multimodal understanding. Useful supervision is rarely produced by a single rendering pass; instead it emerges through iterative generation, inspection, correction, filtering, and export. We present DataEvolver, a closed-loop visual data engine that organizes this process around explicit goals, persistent artifacts, bounded corrective actions, and acceptance decisions. DataEvolver supports multiple artifact types, including RGB images, masks, depth maps, normal maps, meshes, poses, trajectories, and review traces. In the current release, the system operates through two coupled loops: generation-time self-correction within each sample and validation-time self-expansion across dataset rounds. We validate the framework on an image-level object-rotation setting. With a fixed Qwen-Edit LoRA probe, our final Ours+DualGate model outperforms both the unadapted base model and a public multi-angle LoRA on SpatialEdit and a held-out evaluation set. Ablations show a consistent improvement path from scene-aware generation to feedback-driven correction and dual-gated validation. Beyond the released rotation data, our main contribution is a reusable framework for building visual datasets through explicit goal tracking, review, correction, and acceptance loops.
May 2, 2026

SciResearcher: Scaling Deep Research Agents for Frontier Scientific Reasoning

Frontier scientific reasoning is rapidly emerging as a key foundation for advancing AI agents in automated scientific discovery. Deep research agents offer a promising approach to this challenge. These models develop robust problem-solving capabilities through post-training on information-seeking tasks, which are typically curated via knowledge graph construction or iterative web browsing. However, these strategies face inherent limitations in frontier science, where domain-specific knowledge is scattered across sparse and heterogeneous academic sources, and problem solving requires sophisticated computation and reasoning far beyond factual recall. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciResearcher, a fully automated agentic framework for frontier-science data construction. SciResearcher synthesizes diverse conceptual and computational tasks grounded in academic evidence, while eliciting information acquisition, tool-integrated reasoning, and long-horizon capabilities. Leveraging the curated data for supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, we develop SciResearcher-8B, an agent foundation model that achieves 19.46% on the HLE-Bio/Chem-Gold benchmark, establishing a new state of the art at its parameter scale and surpassing several larger proprietary agents. It further achieves 13-15% absolute gains on SuperGPQA-Hard-Biology and TRQA-Literature benchmarks. Overall, SciResearcher introduces a new paradigm for automated data construction for frontier scientific reasoning and offers a scalable path toward future scientific agents.
May 2, 2026

Decision Boundary-aware Generation for Long-tailed Learning

Long-tailed data bias decision boundaries toward head classes and degrade tail class accuracy. Diffusion-based generative augmentation address this problem by generating additional data, while head-to-tail transfer further mitigate the generator bias inherit from long-tailed dataset. However, we show that while head-to-tail transfer helps balance the decision space of the classifier, it also induces latent non-local feature mixing that entangles inter-class features, causing decision boundary overlap and tail class distribution shift. To address this, we first identify the problem of boundary ambiguity and then propose Decision Boundary-aware Generation (DBG) framework, which promotes near-boundary representation learning by generating informative near-boundary samples. Overall, DBG rebalances the long-tailed dataset while yielding more separable decision space for long-tailed learning. Across standard long-tailed benchmarks, DBG consistently improves tail class and overall accuracy with less inter-class overlap. The code of DBG is available at https://github.com/keepdigitalabc-svg/DBG.
May 2, 2026

DataArc-SynData-Toolkit: A Unified Closed-Loop Framework for Multi-Path, Multimodal, and Multilingual Data Synthesis

Synthetic data has emerged as a crucial solution to the data scarcity bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for specialized domains and low-resource languages. However, the broader adoption of existing synthetic data tools is severely hindered by convoluted workflows, fragmented data standards, and limited scalability across modalities. To address these limitations, we develop DataArc-SynData-Toolkit, an open-source framework featuring: (1) a configuration-driven, end-to-end pipeline equipped with an intuitive visual interface and simplified CLI for exceptional usability; (2) a unified, quality-controllable synthesis paradigm that standardizes multi-source data generation to ensure high reusability; and (3) a highly modular architecture designed for seamless multimodal, multilingual, and multi-task adaptation. We apply the toolkit in multiple application scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our toolkit achieves an optimal balance between generation efficiency and data quality. By offering an end-to-end and visually interactive pipeline, DataArc-SynData-Toolkit significantly lowers the technical barrier to synthetic data generation and subsequent model training, accelerating its practical deployment in real-world applications.
May 2, 2026

S3S^3-R1: Learning to Retrieve and Answer Step-by-Step with Synthetic Data

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has enabled newer capabilities in models, such as agentic tool-use for search. However, these models struggle primarily due to limitations with sparse outcome-based rewards and a lack of training data that encapsulates questions of differing hardness, which results in models not performing deeper searches with tools to collect evidence for question-answering. To address these limitations, we introduce S^3-R1 (Synthetic data and stabilized Search R1), a framework that couples a data-centric approach with denser learning signals. We first develop a synthetic generation and curation pipeline that programmatically derives diverse, multi-hop questions from existing documents. This pipeline incorporates a retrieval-based verification step to specifically isolate questions of intermediate difficulty. We then pair this expanded training set with a reward structure that evaluates both intermediate search quality and the correctness of the final answer. This setup directly mitigates the credit assignment problems inherent to sparse rewards. Our evaluations show that S^3-R1 outperforms existing baselines by learning more effective search and synthesis strategies, yielding up to a 10% improvement in robust generalization on out-of-domain datasets.
Apr 30, 2026

Synthetic Computers at Scale for Long-Horizon Productivity Simulation

Realistic long-horizon productivity work is strongly conditioned on user-specific computer environments, where much of the work context is stored and organized through directory structures and content-rich artifacts. To scale synthetic data creation for such productivity scenarios, we introduce Synthetic Computers at Scale, a scalable methodology for creating such environments with realistic folder hierarchies and content-rich artifacts (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). Conditioned on each synthetic computer, we run long-horizon simulations: one agent creates productivity objectives that are specific to the computer's user and require multiple professional deliverables and about a month of human work; another agent then acts as that user and keeps working across the computer -- for example, navigating the filesystem for grounding, coordinating with simulated collaborators, and producing professional artifacts -- until these objectives are completed. In preliminary experiments, we create 1,000 synthetic computers and run long-horizon simulations on them; each run requires over 8 hours of agent runtime and spans more than 2,000 turns on average. These simulations produce rich experiential learning signals, whose effectiveness is validated by significant improvements in agent performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain productivity evaluations. Given that personas are abundant at billion scale, this methodology can in principle scale to millions or even billions of synthetic user worlds with sufficient compute, enabling broader coverage of diverse professions, roles, contexts, environments, and productivity needs. We argue that scalable synthetic computer creation, together with at-scale simulations, is highly promising as a foundational substrate for agent self-improvement and agentic reinforcement learning in long-horizon productivity scenarios.
Apr 30, 2026

WaferSAGE: Large Language Model-Powered Wafer Defect Analysis via Synthetic Data Generation and Rubric-Guided Reinforcement Learning

We present WaferSAGE, a framework for wafer defect visual question answering using small vision-language models. To address data scarcity in semiconductor manufacturing, we propose a three-stage synthesis pipeline incorporating structured rubric generation for precise evaluation. Starting from limited labeled wafer maps, we employ clustering-based cleaning to filter label noise, then generate comprehensive defect descriptions using vision-language models, which are converted into structured evaluation rubrics criteria. These rubrics guide the synthesis of VQA pairs, ensuring coverage across defect type identification, spatial distribution, morphology, and root cause analysis. Our dual assessment framework aligns rule-based metrics with LLM-Judge scores via Bayesian optimization, enabling reliable automated evaluation. Through curriculum-based reinforcement learning with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) and rubric-aligned rewards, our 4B-parameter Qwen3-VL model achieves a 6.493 LLM-Judge score, closely approaching Gemini-3-Flash (7.149) while enabling complete on-premise deployment. We demonstrate that small models with domain-specific training can surpass proprietary large models in specialized industrial visual understanding, offering a viable path for privacy-preserving, cost-effective deployment in semiconductor manufacturing.
Apr 29, 2026

ProcFunc: Function-Oriented Abstractions for Procedural 3D Generation in Python

We introduce ProcFunc, a library for Blender-based procedural 3D generation in Python. ProcFunc provides a library of easy-to-use Python functions, which streamline creating, combining, analyzing, and executing procedural generation code. ProcFunc makes it easy to create large-scale diverse training data, by combinatorial compositions of semantic components. VLMs can use ProcFunc to edit procedural material and geometry code and can create new procedural code with significantly fewer coding errors. Finally, as an example use case, we use ProcFunc to develop a new procedural generator of indoor rooms, which includes a collection of new compositional procedural materials. We demonstrate the detail, runtime efficiency, and diversity of this room generator, as well as its use for 3D synthetic data generation. Please visit https://github.com/princeton-vl/procfunc for source code.
Apr 29, 2026

ClawGym: A Scalable Framework for Building Effective Claw Agents

Claw-style environments support multi-step workflows over local files, tools, and persistent workspace states. However, scalable development around these environments remains constrained by the absence of a systematic framework, especially one for synthesizing verifiable training data and integrating it with agent training and diagnostic evaluation. To address this challenge, we present ClawGym, a scalable framework that supports the full lifecycle of Claw-style personal agent development. Concretely, we construct ClawGym-SynData, a diverse dataset of 13.5K filtered tasks synthesized from persona-driven intents and skill-grounded operations, paired with realistic mock workspaces and hybrid verification mechanisms. We then train a family of capable Claw-style models, termed ClawGym-Agents, through supervised fine-tuning on black-box rollout trajectories, and further explore reinforcement learning via a lightweight pipeline that parallelizes rollouts across per-task sandboxes. To support reliable evaluation, we further construct ClawGym-Bench, a benchmark of 200 instances calibrated through automated filtering and human-LLM review. Relevant resources have been released at https://github.com/ClawGym.
Apr 29, 2026

Fidelity, Diversity, and Privacy: A Multi-Dimensional LLM Evaluation for Clinical Data Augmentation

The scarcity of high-quality annotated medical data, particularly in mental health, poses a significant bottleneck for training robust machine learning models. Privacy regulations restrict data sharing, making synthetic data generation a promising alternative. The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in a data augmentation pipeline could be leveraged as an alternative in this field. In the proposed methodology, DeepSeek-R1, OpenBioLLM-Llama3 and Qwen 3.5 are used to generate synthetic mental health evaluation reports conditioned on specific International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) codes. Because naive text generation can lead to mode collapse or privacy breaches (memorization), a comprehensive evaluation framework is introduced. The generated diagnostic texts are assessed across three dimensions: semantic fidelity, lexical diversity, and privacy/plagiarism. The results demonstrate that all models can generate clinically coherent, diverse, and privacy-safe synthetic reports, significantly expanding the available training data for clinical natural language processing tasks without compromising patient confidentiality.
Apr 29, 2026

Naamah: A Large Scale Synthetic Sanskrit NER Corpus via DBpedia Seeding and LLM Generation

The digitisation of classical Sanskrit literature is impeded by a scarcity of annotated resources, particularly for Named Entity Recognition. While recent methodologies utilise generic Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation, these approaches remain prone to error and often lack the reasoning depth required for classical grammar. In this work, we introduce Naamah, a high quality silver standard Sanskrit NER dataset comprising 102,942 sentences. We propose a methodology that combines entity extraction from DBpedia with the generative capabilities of a 24B parameter hybrid reasoning model to create grammatically natural and synthetically diverse training data. We utilize this dataset to benchmark two transformer architectures: the massive multilingual XLM RoBERTa and the parameter efficient IndicBERTv2.
Apr 28, 2026

EvoSelect: Data-Efficient LLM Evolution for Targeted Task Adaptation

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to a targeted task efficiently and effectively remains a fundamental challenge. Such adaptation often requires iteratively improving the model toward a targeted task, yet collecting high-quality human-labeled data to support this process is costly and difficult to scale. As a result, synthetic data generation has emerged as a flexible and scalable alternative. One straightforward approach is through an iterative generation-training loop, where candidate data are synthesized through an external generator, the model is updated using these data and the process is repeated over iterations. However, generated samples can be noisy, highly redundant, or even misaligned with the targeted task distribution. Training indiscriminately on such data can dilute useful learning signals and even degrade model performance. To address this, we introduce a refined paradigm, namely an iterative generation-selection-training loop, which incorporates a selection step prior to model updates. Building on this paradigm, we propose EvoSelect, a data-efficient framework to evolve LLM effectively. Given candidate samples produced by the data generator, EvoSelect selects training data by jointly modeling targeted task alignment and diversity. We estimate task relevance through optimal transport with proxy gradient representations, which quantifies how well candidate samples align with the targeted task distribution. To mitigate redundancy, we incorporate a diversification mechanism that promotes coverage of complementary training samples. By interleaving alignment and diversification, EvoSelect enables progressive LLM evolution toward targeted tasks. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that with either weak or strong data generators, EvoSelect consistently improves adaptation efficacy over existing data selection methods.
Apr 28, 2026

BARRED: Synthetic Training of Custom Policy Guardrails via Asymmetric Debate

Deploying guardrails for custom policies remains challenging, as generic safety models fail to capture task-specific requirements, while prompting LLMs suffers from inconsistent boundary-case performance and high inference costs. Training custom classifiers achieves both accuracy and efficiency, yet demands substantial labeled data that is costly to obtain. We present BARRED (Boundary Alignment Refinement through REflection and Debate), a framework for generating faithful and diverse synthetic training data using only a task description and a small set of unlabeled examples. Our approach decomposes the domain space into dimensions to ensure comprehensive coverage, and employs multi-agent debate to verify label correctness, yielding a high-fidelity training corpus. Experiments across diverse custom policies demonstrate that small language models finetuned on our synthetic data consistently outperform state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs (including reasoning models) and dedicated guardrail models. Ablation studies confirm that both dimension decomposition and debate-based verification are critical for ensuring the diversity and label fidelity required for effective fine-tuning. The BARRED framework eliminates the reliance on extensive human annotation, offering a scalable solution for accurate custom guardrails.
Apr 27, 2026

STELLAR-E: a Synthetic, Tailored, End-to-end LLM Application Rigorous Evaluator

The increasing reliance on Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse sectors highlights the need for robust domain-specific and language-specific evaluation datasets; however, the collection of such datasets is challenging due to privacy concerns, regulatory restrictions, and the time cost for manual creation. Existing automated benchmarking methods are often limited by relying on pre-existing data, poor scalability, single-domain focus, and lack of multilingual support. We present STELLAR-E - a fully automated system to generate high-quality synthetic datasets of custom size, using minimal human inputs without depending on existing datasets. The system is structured in two stages: (1) We modify the TGRT Self-Instruct framework to create a synthetic data engine that enables controllable, custom synthetic dataset generation, and (2) an evaluation pipeline incorporating statistical and LLM-based metrics to assess the applicability of the synthetic dataset for LLM-based application evaluations. The synthetic datasets reach an average difference of +5.7% in terms of LLM-as-a-judge scores against existing language-specific benchmarks, demonstrating comparable quality for comprehensive assessment of big and small LLMs. While real datasets remain slightly more challenging for LLMs especially for smaller models, this work establishes a scalable and domain-adaptable benchmarking framework that supports fair evaluation of LLM applications, offering a faster alternative to manual approaches and enabling high-efficiency automated quality assurance cycles.
Apr 27, 2026

Zero-to-CAD: Agentic Synthesis of Interpretable CAD Programs at Million-Scale Without Real Data

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are defined by their construction history: a parametric recipe that encodes design intent. However, existing large-scale 3D datasets predominantly consist of boundary representations (B-Reps) or meshes, stripping away this critical procedural information. To address this scarcity, we introduce Zero-to-CAD, a scalable framework for synthesizing executable CAD construction sequences. We frame synthesis as an agentic search problem: by embedding a large language model (LLM) within a feedback-driven CAD environment, our system iteratively generates, executes, and validates code using tools and documentation lookup to promote geometric validity and operation diversity. This agentic approach enables the synthesis of approximately one million executable, readable, editable CAD sequences, covering a rich vocabulary of operations beyond sketch-and-extrude workflows. We also release a curated subset of 100,000 high-quality models selected for geometric diversity. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we fine-tune a vision-language model on our synthetic data to reconstruct editable CAD programs from multi-view images, outperforming strong baselines, including GPT-5.2, and effectively bootstrapping sequence generation capabilities without real construction-history training data. Zero-to-CAD bridges the gap between geometric scale and parametric interpretability, offering a vital resource for the next generation of CAD AI.
Apr 26, 2026

Generative Synthetic Data for Causal Inference: Pitfalls, Remedies, and Opportunities

Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference. We show that fully generative tabular synthesizers, including GAN- and LLM-based models, can preserve predictive utility while distorting average treatment effect (ATE) estimates. The failure is structural: ATE preservation requires both a realistic covariate law and an accurate treatment-effect contrast, whereas prediction loss penalizes treatment-effect error only through an overlap-weighted term. Thus, under imbalance or limited overlap, a generator may reproduce dominant observed outcomes while underlearning intervention-relevant contrasts. We formalize this mismatch through sensitivity and loss-decomposition results. Motivated by this causal analysis and intuition, we propose a hybrid synthetic-data framework for causal inference that generates covariates while modeling treatment and outcome mechanisms separately. We evaluate the framework in three settings: ATE preservation under fully generative versus hybrid synthesis, augmentation for practical positivity problems, and diagnostic simulation engines for comparing OR, IPW, AIPW, and TMLE before real-data analysis. We also stress-test the hybrid construction across settings that vary overlap, covariate dimension, seed sample size, and treatment-effect complexity, including a logistic outcome-model misspecification check. Across controlled simulation experiments, hybrid synthesis improves causal fidelity relative to fully generative baselines; the ACTG application shows improved predictive fidelity and potential for finite-sample estimator benchmarking. LLM-based hybrid synthesis is often more faithful than CTGAN in settings where causal fidelity can be assessed.
Apr 26, 2026

LegalDrill: Diagnosis-Driven Synthesis for Legal Reasoning in Small Language Models

Small language models (SLMs) are promising for real-world deployment due to their efficiency and low operational cost. However, their limited capacity struggles with high-stakes legal reasoning tasks that require coherent statute interpretation and logically consistent deduction. Furthermore, training SLMs for such tasks demands high-quality, concise reasoning trajectories, which are prohibitively expensive to manually collect and difficult to curate via standard rejection sampling, lacking granularity beyond final verdicts. To address these challenges, we propose {LegalDrill}, a diagnosis-driven synthesis framework that extracts and iteratively refines reasoning trajectories from a capable teacher via fine-grained prompting, then a self-reflective verification is employed to adaptively select the most effective data for the SLM student. The resulting data empower SLM training through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Extensive experiments on several legal benchmarks demonstrate that {LegalDrill} significantly bolsters the legal reasoning capabilities of representative SLMs while bypassing the need for scarce expert annotations, paving a scalable path toward practical legal reasoning systems.
Apr 23, 2026

Using Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Survey Data for Geographically Explicit Population Synthesis

There is a growing interest in utilizing synthetic populations for a diverse range of applications. At the same time, we are witnessing a tremendous growth in artificial intelligence in all walks of life. This paper evaluates whether zero-shot large language model (LLM)-generated health survey data can serve as inputs to a conventional iterative proportional fitting (IPF) workflow for geographically explicit population synthesis. Using the 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we generate synthetic survey records for the U.S. states of Colorado and Mississippi with GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.5-Pro. We use the generated data in an IPF-based synthesis pipeline and evaluate the resulting census tract-level synthetic populations against external benchmarks. Results show both LLMs capture several major state-level contrasts, indicating zero-shot generation produces geographically differentiated survey data. However, performance is strongly variable-dependent. Downstream effects in population synthesis are mixed, as IPF sometimes amplifies or reduces errors in the generated data. Spatial validation shows that LLM-based populations reproduce census tract-level patterns reasonably well, especially for variables that were more aligned with the ground truth data. Overall, the LLM-generated survey data shows promise as supplementary input, but not yet as a replacement for real survey data.
Apr 23, 2026

Geometric Characterisation and Structured Trajectory Surrogates for Clinical Dataset Condensation

Dataset condensation constructs compact synthetic datasets that retain the training utility of large real-world datasets, enabling efficient model development and potentially supporting downstream research in governed domains such as healthcare. Trajectory matching is a widely used condensation approach that supervises synthetic data using changes in model parameters observed during training on real data, yet the structure of this supervision signal remains poorly understood. In this paper, we provide a geometric characterisation of trajectory matching, showing that a fixed synthetic dataset can only reproduce a limited span of such training-induced parameter changes. When the resulting supervision signal is spectrally broad, this creates a conditional representability bottleneck. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose Bezier Trajectory Matching (BTM), which replaces stochastic gradient descent (SGD) trajectories with quadratic Bezier trajectory surrogates between initial and final model states. These surrogates are optimised to reduce average loss along the path while replacing broad SGD-derived supervision with a more structured, lower-rank signal that is better aligned with the optimisation constraints of a fixed synthetic dataset, and they substantially reduce trajectory storage. Experiments on five clinical datasets demonstrate that BTM consistently matches or improves upon standard trajectory matching, with the largest gains in low-prevalence and low-synthetic-budget settings. These results indicate that effective trajectory matching depends on structuring the supervision signal rather than reproducing stochastic optimisation paths.
Apr 23, 2026

AgenticQwen: Training Small Agentic Language Models with Dual Data Flywheels for Industrial-Scale Tool Use

Modern industrial applications increasingly demand language models that act as agents, capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use in real-world settings. These tasks are typically performed under strict cost and latency constraints, making small agentic models highly desirable. In this paper, we introduce the AgenticQwen family of models, trained via multi-round reinforcement learning (RL) on synthetic data and a limited amount of open-source data. Our training framework combines reasoning RL and agentic RL with dual data flywheels that automatically generate increasingly challenging tasks. The reasoning flywheel increases task difficulty by learning from errors, while the agentic flywheel expands linear workflows into multi-branch behavior trees that better reflect the decision complexity of real-world applications. We validate AgenticQwen on public benchmarks and in an industrial agent system. The models achieve strong performance on multiple agentic benchmarks, and in our industrial agent system, close the gap with much larger models on search and data analysis tasks. Model checkpoints and part of the synthetic data: https://huggingface.co/collections/alibaba-pai/agenticqwen. Data synthesis and RL training code: https://github.com/haruhi-sudo/data_synth_and_rl. The data synthesis pipeline is also integrated into EasyDistill: https://github.com/modelscope/easydistill.
Apr 23, 2026

SemanticAgent: A Semantics-Aware Framework for Text-to-SQL Data Synthesis

Existing text-to-SQL synthesis pipelines still conflate executability with semantic validity: syntactic checks and execution-based validation can retain queries that execute successfully while violating database semantics. To address these limitations, we propose SemanticAgent, a semantic-aware synthesis framework. SemanticAgent organizes synthesis around three specialized modules: an analyzer, a synthesizer, and a verifier. Through a three-stage protocol of semantic analysis, stepwise synthesis, and diagnostic refinement, SemanticAgent transforms execution-based validation alone into a traceable reasoning process. Our framework generates synthetic data that consistently outperforms prior synthesis methods under semantic-quality evaluation, leading to stronger downstream fine-tuning performance, especially on semantically demanding benchmarks.
Apr 22, 2026

Synthetic Data in Education: Empirical Insights from Traditional Resampling and Deep Generative Models

Synthetic data generation offers promise for addressing data scarcity and privacy concerns in educational technology, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance for selecting between traditional resampling techniques and modern deep learning approaches. This study presents the first systematic benchmark comparing these paradigms using a 10,000-record student performance dataset. We evaluate three resampling methods (SMOTE, Bootstrap, Random Oversampling) against three deep learning models (Autoencoder, Variational Autoencoder, Copula-GAN) across multiple dimensions: distributional fidelity (Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance, Jensen-Shannon divergence), machine learning utility such as Train-on-Synthetic-Test-on-Real scores (TSTR), and privacy preservation (Distance to Closest Record). Our findings reveal a fundamental trade-off: resampling methods achieve near-perfect utility (TSTR: 0.997) but completely fail privacy protection (DCR ~ 0.00), while deep learning models provide strong privacy guarantees (DCR ~ 1.00) at significant utility cost. Variational Autoencoders emerge as the optimal compromise, maintaining 83.3% predictive performance while ensuring complete privacy protection. We also provide actionable recommendations: use traditional resampling for internal development where privacy is controlled, and VAEs for external data sharing where privacy is paramount. This work establishes a foundational benchmark and practical decision framework for synthetic data generation in learning analytics.
Apr 22, 2026

CHORUS: An Agentic Framework for Generating Realistic Deliberation Data

Understanding the intricate dynamics of online discourse depends on large-scale deliberation data, a resource that remains scarce across interactive web platforms due to restrictive accessibility policies, ethical concerns and inconsistent data quality. In this paper, we propose Chorus, an agentic framework, which orchestrates LLM-powered actors with behaviorally consistent personas to generate realistic deliberation discussions. Each actor is governed by an autonomous agent equipped with memory of the evolving discussion, while participation timing is governed by a principled Poisson process-based temporal model, which approximates the heterogeneous engagement patterns of real users. The framework is further supported by structured tool usage, enabling actors to access external resources and facilitating integration with interactive web platforms. The framework was deployed on the Deliberate platform and evaluated by 30 expert participants across three dimensions: content realism, discussion coherence and analytical utility, confirming Chorus as a practical tool for generating high-quality deliberation data suitable for online discourse analysis
Apr 22, 2026

Graph2Counsel: Clinically Grounded Synthetic Counseling Dialogue Generation from Client Psychological Graphs

Rising demand for mental health support has increased interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for counseling, but adapting them to this safety-critical domain is hindered by limited real-world data due to privacy constraints. Synthetic datasets provide a promising alternative, but existing approaches often rely on unstructured or semi-structured text inputs and overlook structural dependencies between a client's cognitive, emotional, and behavioral states, leading to psychologically inconsistent and less realistic interactions. We introduce Graph2Counsel, a framework for generating synthetic counseling sessions grounded in Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) that encode relationships among clients' thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Graph2Counsel uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and CPG, and explores prompting strategies including CoT and Multi-Agent Feedback. It produces 760 sessions from 76 CPGs across diverse client profiles. In expert evaluation, our dataset outperforms prior datasets on specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety (Krippendorff's αα = 0.70). Fine-tuning an open-source model on this dataset improves performance on several metrics on CounselingBench and CounselBench, while matching baselines on others. We further introduce Therapy-Eval, a multi-turn evaluation framework, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our fine-tuned model in realistic therapeutic conversations. We make our code, data and fine-tuned model public.