Synthetic Data Generation
Momentum
43 papers in the last four weeks, up 59% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.
Latest papers 417
High-fidelity simulation of mmWave radar signals for dynamic human motion is valuable for developing radar-based human sensing models; yet collecting accurately labeled measurements for a specific deployment site remains expensive. We present HybridSim, a physics-learning hybrid simulator that synthesizes mmWave radar signals from dynamic human meshes under a fixed indoor room configuration, explicitly decoupling propagation into two components. To parameterize the human subject, we use a tri-plane representation to extract human features and a Graph Convolutional Network to stabilize optimization and mitigate gradient instability. The direct signal path is modeled via an inverse-rendering formulation with a microfacet BRDF to capture primary surface reflections. In parallel, the indirect path is approximated by combining 3D Gaussian Splatting with a virtual-receiver geometry to fit and reproduce site-specific multipath interference patterns, achieving substantially lower computational cost than explicit full ray tracing. Experiments in a fixed-room setting show improved agreement with a physically based reference and consistent gains on downstream radar-based human sensing tasks when using HybridSim for site-specific data augmentation.
SD-MAR: Multi-image Analytical Reasoning via Synthetic Data and Reinforcement Learning
Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong perceptual abilities but remain limited in tasks requiring analytical reasoning across multiple visual states, such as multi-image comparison, change detection, and multi-step visual inference. These capabilities are critical for real-world multimodal applications where reasoning must be grounded in systematic differences between visual contexts. However, existing benchmarks rarely require both explicit visual comparison and analytical reasoning, leaving this capability underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SD-MAR (Synthetic Data for Multi-image Analytical Reasoning), a framework for training and evaluating VLMs on multi-image analytical reasoning. SD-MAR constructs paired visual scenarios through controlled perturbations and generates reasoning tasks spanning semantic change attribution and quantitative comparison. We further train VLMs using GRPO-lite with Backward Discounted Allocation (BDA), a reinforcement learning approach that removes KL regularization to encourage stronger policy optimization while allocating greater credit to the later reasoning steps where analytical conclusions are formed. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B and InternVL3-8B show that GRPO-lite fine-tuning on SD-MAR improves in-domain accuracy by up to 36.95%, with Qwen2.5-VL-7B outperforming GPT-4.1 on the SD-MAR benchmark. Importantly, out-of-domain generalization is preserved or improved: performance remains within 1% on MME, MMMU-Pro, and MathVista, while improving by up to 4% on MMBench. LLM-as-judge evaluation further demonstrates consistent improvements in logical coherence and explanation quality across both models.
NexForge: Scaling Executable Agent Tasks via Requirement-First Synthesis
Scaling executable agent training data is bottlenecked by substrate-first methods that tie task generation to predefined tools, repositories, or skill graphs: expanding coverage requires manual expansion of the substrate, each new domain demands a bespoke pipeline, and the resulting task distributions often reflect substrate convenience rather than real-world demand. We introduce NexForge, a requirement-first framework that compiles free-form capability requirements into executable agent training data. NexForge first performs research-based demand discovery to identify representative task forms, realistic scenarios, and their relative prevalence. It then applies distribution-aware task compilation and automatically retrieves or constructs the files, repositories, dependencies, and runtime configurations required to materialize each task, followed by teacher rollout collection and trajectory distillation. The same pipeline, without any domain-specific infrastructure, produces 3,600 terminal tasks and 2,000 office tasks, improving Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Base from 22.5% to 52.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and from 813 to 1338 Elo on GDPval; scaling to 43.2K terminal tasks reaches 58.4%, surpassing Claude Opus 4.6. Scaled further, NexForge-synthesized data contributes to the training of Nex-N2, a family of publicly available agent models that lift Qwen3.5-35B-A3B to 75.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and to 1585 Elo on GDPval -- achieving state-of-the-art open-source performance and surpassing several frontier proprietary systems. Nex-N2 models are available at https://nex.sii.edu.cn/
When T2I Synthetic Data Backfires: Amplified Privacy Risks in Real-Synthetic Mix Training
To overcome data scarcity and privacy constraints in data collection, it has become standard practice across academia and industry to augment real training data with text-to-image (T2I)-generated synthetic data, a paradigm we term Real-Synthetic Mix-Training (RSMT). While substituting synthetic data for sensitive real samples is widely regarded as a means to mitigate privacy exposure of the substituted data, the risk to the remaining real samples that actively participate in training has remained largely unexamined. This work reveals, for the first time, that RSMT can substantially amplify privacy leakage of these real training samples. We establish a theoretical framework, RSMT Memorization Amplification, proving that incorporating synthetic data displaces real samples toward peripheral regions of the mixed feature space, in turn forcing the model to memorize them more aggressively. Guided by this foundation, we propose RSMixLeak to systematically assess this risk through membership inference attacks (MIAs). RSMixLeak comprises two variants depending on the adversary's capability. The non-adversarial variant audits a benign RSMT pipeline with an honest T2I provider, establishing a lower bound on the leakage induced by the intrinsic gap between real and T2I-generated data. The adversarial variant considers an adversary who controls the T2I model or contributes crafted data to the T2I provider, and deliberately enlarges this distributional gap on a target class via either high-level semantic attribute binding or imperceptible pixel-level coating, further amplifying leakage on real training data while improving downstream model utility. Motivated by these findings, we further propose a lightweight leakage propensity indicator computable from real data alone that reliably identifies high-risk datasets unsuitable for entering RSMT, as a self-assessable mitigation.
DermDepth: Toward Monocular Metric Scale 3D Reconstruction Models for Dermatology
Dermatological practice routinely involves measuring and tracking lesion size, morphology and texture, as critical components of wound or skin cancer screening, monitoring and diagnosis. To accomplish this task, practitioners often image the skin surface with commonly available off-the-shelf camera sensors. This has led to an overwhelming research focus on 2D methods while these objectives naturally benefit from 3D information. In this paper, we demonstrate that dense monocular 3D reconstructions, metric scale measurements and rich surface normal texture estimates are achievable for both dermoscopic and macroscopic cases without the need for additional hardware or multiple captures. We present DermDepth, the first single-view metric scale 3D model for the dermatological domain and D-Synth, the first synthetic dermoscopic dataset with pixel-perfect 3D information. Our experiments show training DermDepth on D-Synth corrects metric scale error from over 16x to under 1.1x for real dermoscopic data, while preserving geometric quality and increasing texture richness. Fine-tuning on a small amount of real clinical samples generalizes our method across three real-world benchmarks spanning the few mm to hundred cm range, diverse skin-tones, chronic wound cases and produces measurements broadly consistent with disease size reported in medical literature. All code, data and models are available at https://github.com/hectorcarrion/dermdepth.
Metric-Guided Synthetic Image Data Rendering for Deep Learning compatible with Agentic AI
Deep learning computer vision for scientific applications requires collecting and annotating large datasets in a laborious, expensive and error-prone process. Synthetic data generation through 3D modelling and rendering may simplify this process and increase the accuracy of annotations by generating them programmatically. However, minimising the domain gap between real and synthetic images visually is subjective and lacks systematic quantitative guidance. We present GraNatPy, a Python package with metrics to guide improvement of the rendered scene. We show that quantifiable increase in realism, diversity and size of rendered dataset correlates with improved visual perception of the scene and higher zero-shot performance of an object detection model. Furthermore, we demonstrated using photographs of virological plaque assays that gradient similarity affects performance on small object detection, which can be improved by mixing real and synthetic data. Finally, we turn procedural data rendering into an agentic skill (SynthClaw) to automate the procedural parameter optimisation.
AdaPCLA: Adaptive Prior-Calibrated Logit Adjustment for Long-Tailed Longitudinal EHR Generation
Generative modeling of longitudinal Electronic Health Records is increasingly important for privacy-preserving research, yet standard autoregressive models tend to underrepresent the co-occurrence structure of tail events (i.e., diseases, symptoms), reducing the fidelity and faithfulness of generated data for rare subpopulations. To this end, we propose AdaPCLA framework, which enables generative models to adaptively fit and generate EHR data through a data distribution-aware training strategy; this is achieved by internalizing data knowledge parameters by simulated annealing training. It also supports training-free adaptation to a diverse clinical population for generation through zero-shot distribution control. Moreover, our theoretical analysis characterizes rare-code logit updates through the label-wise empirical NTK and derives a prior-internalization bound for how annealing speed and NTK conditioning affect retained prior signals. Experiments on real-world data show that AdaPCLA achieves consistent gains in tail plausibility, downstream utility, and zero-shot control; in particular, it improves TailPairSeen over HALO by 114.2% on MIMIC-III and 65.1% on MIMIC-IV, outperforms GPT-style generation by 3.5% F1 for zero-shot cross-population adaptation.
TraceSynth: Generating Production-Quality Kernel Traces with Constraint-Guided Diffusion Models
Machine learning models for system diagnostics rely on kernel execution traces to capture fine-grained system behavior, but collecting production traces in industrial systems is costly due to runtime overhead, storage demands, and privacy constraints. We present TraceSynth, a diffusion-based framework for generating synthetic kernel traces that augment limited real data for downstream ML tasks. TraceSynth models traces as multi-channel sequences (event types, timestamps, CPU affinity, thread identifiers, and process metadata) using a Transformer-based denoising diffusion process with constraint-guided repair to enforce system invariants. Across six benchmarks, results show strong workload dependence. For deterministic, compute-heavy workloads (scimark2), synthetic augmentation achieves 87.2% F1-Macro at context length L=4096, only 2.6 percentage points below real-only baselines. Context length is the dominant quality factor, with L=4096 yielding a +104% relative improvement over L=256, while constraint-guided repair improves synthetic data quality by up to 4.3%. Ablation studies show that lightweight 2-channel models retain 97-99% of the performance of full 6-channel models at roughly half the computational cost. TraceSynth supports cost-effective augmentation of kernel execution traces in production observability pipelines and helps identify when synthetic data can substitute for limited real traces.
IG-GAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Aerodynamic Data Generation Based on Intrinsic Geometry
Existing generative models learn data distributions in flat Euclidean space. However, most data in our real world are manifolds embedded in high dimensional Euclidean space. Therefore, we propose an intrinsic-geometry-based generative adversarial network (IG-GAN) for data generation in the field of aerodynamics. The generator of the IG-GAN represents aerodynamic data as a piecewise smooth manifold constructed by Bézier surfaces, and the generator tries to learn the coefficients of each Bézier surface to further combine multiple Bézier surfaces into a smooth manifold automatically. The discriminator in the IG-GAN is a radial-basis-function based discriminator (RBF-D). Experimental results show that IG-GAN achieves lower predicted Mean Squared Errors (MSEs) than those of three baselines. Specifically, on the Burgers' equation dataset, IG-GAN reduces the predicted MSE of velocity u by 97.41% compared with state of the art SSL-Transformer. Additionally, on the ONERA M6 aircraft dataset, IG-GAN reduces the overall MSE of nine aerodynamic coefficients by 82.95% compared with SSL-Transformer.
Trustworthy synthetic data for campaign decision support: strategy simulation fidelity and the PolicySynth framework
Decision support systems (DSS) increasingly run retention what-if analysis on synthetic customer populations, because privacy constraints preclude unrestricted use of real data. Such a system is trustworthy only if the synthetic data lead managers to the same decisions as the real data would; yet prevailing criteria certify distributional similarity, not decision alignment, so a synthetic population can match every marginal distribution while still steering a marketing team toward the wrong campaigns. We close this decision-alignment gap with three contributions: strategy simulation fidelity (SSF), a criterion measuring how often the synthetic population yields the same go/no-go campaign decision as the real population; PolicySynth, a DSS framework whose generator is conditioned on the production churn scorer to align decision-relevant structure; and a three-axis reporting standard of decision alignment, membership-inference resistance, and novel-record rate as the minimum deployment quality gate. On a telecommunications churn corpus and a banking acquisition corpus, PolicySynth attains a mean SSF of 0.923 and 0.960, with seed-to-seed variance roughly ten times tighter than CTGAN on telecommunications and 2.5 times on banking. This stability is the deployable property: go/no-go recommendations shift by at most 1.2 percentage points between monthly retraining cycles, against 11.5 for CTGAN, a reversed recommendation on one campaign in nine. A bootstrap baseline matches PolicySynth on SSF yet copies real records verbatim and fails membership inference, evidence that no single axis suffices. PolicySynth reliably supports directional go/no-go screening; its ROI estimates diverge from real outcomes by 70 to 78% and require the volume correction we document.
AU-Guided Synthetic Video Generation for Micro-Expression Recognition
Micro-expression recognition is limited by the small scale, narrow demographic coverage, and restricted emotion labels of existing datasets. We introduce EquiME, a synthetic micro-expression dataset built from AU-guided image-to-video generation. EquiME contains 75K videos generated from 15K source face images across five target emotions, together with automatically inferred demographic metadata and video-quality measurements. We evaluate EquiME using frame-pair similarity, spatial variation, and no-reference perceptual-quality metrics, together with cross-dataset MER experiments on SAMM and CASME II. Models trained on EquiME achieve competitive cross-dataset performance on SAMM and CASME II and show comparatively low variation across the four evaluated architectures. This paper focuses on the dataset design, the structured AU-conditioning pipeline used for video generation, and the empirical evidence needed to assess EquiME as a synthetic MER resource. Project page: https://kirito-blade.github.io/me-vlm/
WattCouncil: Context-Aware Household Energy Scenario Generation With Governed LLMs
The accelerating shift toward low-carbon power systems, together with the widespread adoption of behind-the-meter technologies such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles, is placing new operational and analytical demands on electricity grids. At the same time, smart-grid research increasingly relies on machine learning (ML), yet progress is constrained by limited access to high-resolution household energy data due to privacy concerns, regulatory barriers, and collection costs. This work presents WattCouncil, a data-generation framework in which household electricity demand is generated by a council of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents operating in specialized roles to generate, audit, and validate structured energy scenarios under explicit cultural, temporal, and physical constraints. Rather than acting as static predictors, these agents serve as adaptive decision-makers within a governed pipeline. Motivated by studies highlighting the importance of contextual factors in energy use, our framework produces context-sensitive daily routines through a guided reasoning process that incorporates household composition, temporal factors, and environmental conditions. We evaluate the generated profiles against the detailed CER dataset, which contains over a year of load measurements for 4232 households together with survey-based socio-economic information. We further assess the consistency of the framework through ablation studies. Source code is available at https://github.com/Singularity-AI-Lab/wattcouncil
OpenLongTail: Generative Scaling of Long-Tail Driving Data
Scaling robust driving policies is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of edge cases in curated datasets. While the real world continuously captures these critical events, such long-tail events remain underutilized when collected from heterogeneous sources. Specifically, diverse but valuable in-the-wild long-tail videos lack the full view coverage required for training policy models, often missing multi-view poses or originating solely from monocular dash cameras. This modality gap prevents these ubiquitous observations from being converted into scalable training data for long-tail generalization. We introduce OpenLongTail, an open-source generative data engine for scaling autonomous driving policies under long-tail events. To transform heterogeneous data sources into view-aligned and temporally coherent multi-view assets that are useful for policy learning, we develop a pose-informed extrapolative view synthesis pipeline that generates the missing views. We further enhance cross-view consistency and the temporal alignment for the newly generated views by injecting Plücker ray geometry into the scalable generation engine. By synthesizing heterogeneous long-tail data, we observe a significant improvement in closed-loop driving robustness in handling long-tail events. By measuring the extrapolative view synthesis and pose metrics, we validate the effectiveness of OpenLongTail in visual fidelity, cross-view consistency, and ego-trajectory recovery.
The Effects of Synthetic Data and Label Distribution on Canola Branch Counting
Collecting annotated plant images for automated phenotyping is often slow and expensive. Plant models simulating growth and development can generate unlimited synthetic images with exact labels. However, previous work has established that whether incorporating synthetic data improves performance depends on the ratio of synthetic to real images and the label distribution of the synthetic dataset. To systematically quantify both factors, we train ResNet-18 models on a canola branch-counting task using a calibrated L-system plant model. We vary each factor independently. Synthetic-to-real ratios of 1:5 to 1:22 broadly improve performance; the best ratio (1:7) reduces mean absolute difference by 7.6% over real-only training. For label distribution, a uniform synthetic distribution is strongly suboptimal (abs. diff. of approximately 1.70); interpolating 90% toward the real distribution yields abs. diff. 0.927, whereas Gaussian smoothing of the real label distribution yields the best overall result (abs. diff. 0.912, a 14.7% improvement over real-only). A minimum of 10 synthetic images per label offers a simpler alternative with modest gains, while 100 per label over-corrects and hurts performance.
SYNRARE: Synthetic Rare Disease EHR Generation for ML Benchmarking
Motivation: Rare disease (RD) diagnosis is frequently delayed due to the similarities in symptoms to common disease variants. Machine Learning Algorithms applied to Electronic Health Records show promise for accelerating the diagnosis; however, legal and privacy concerns pose significant barriers. To address these issues, Synthetic Data Generation is an alternative method for obtaining Electronic Health Records and can be applied with any Machine Learning algorithm for benchmarking and development purposes. Despite the availability of Synthetic Data Generation algorithms, support for generating a subset of patients that differ in a definable degree from the majority to simulate patients with RD is often lacking. Results: We present SYNRARE, a graphical user interface based on the Synthea framework that enables easier modification and generation of synthetic Electronic Health Records of RD patients, which differ only to a definable degree from patients with common diseases, thereby enabling the benchmarking and testing of algorithms under controlled technical conditions. SYNRARE enables researchers to rapidly benchmark their Machine Learning algorithms across any scenario. Availability and implementation: SYNRARE, including detailed instructions for installing, is available at https://gitlab.sdu.dk/screen4care/synrare.
MobiDiff: Semantic-Aware Multi-Channel Discrete Diffusion for Human Mobility Data Generation
Human mobility data are essential for transportation optimization, urban planning, and resource allocation, yet real-world mobility data are costly to collect and difficult to share due to privacy concerns. Recent diffusion-based methods have shown promise in synthesizing realistic mobility patterns, but they typically rely on continuous or latent spatio-temporal traces, limiting their ability to natively model discrete semantic events with explicit region, activity, time, and interval structures. To address this issue, we introduce MobiDiff, an end-to-end discrete diffusion framework that efficiently generates mobility data by directly denoising multi-channel semantic skeletons, avoiding the costly interpolation, latent trace construction, and coarse-to-fine realization pipelines widely used in existing diffusion-based methods. Specifically, MobiDiff decomposes each human check-in event into spatial, activity, and temporal channels, and employs structured event-, group-, and channel-level masking to jointly capture trajectory-level mobility patterns and within-event dependencies. We evaluate generation fidelity, privacy-preserving, and efficiency on three large-scale real-world datasets from Atlanta, Boston, and Seattle. Results show that MobiDiff effectively preserves trajectory length and temporal interval distributions while remaining competitive across broader mobility statistics; it is also much faster than state-of-the-art methods, e.g., 5.3 faster than GeoGen on average during inference. These findings suggest that discrete diffusion offers an interpretable and efficient framework for synthetic mobility data generation.
CASL-VAE: Learning Structured Latent Variables from Unpaired Data for Semi-supervised Clustering and Paired Sample Generation
Quantifying variability in a target population relative to a reference population is central to many scientific and clinical problems (e.g., diseased vs. healthy). Yet, without paired data and in the presence of heterogeneous target variation, existing methods struggle to separate multiple modes of target-specific variation. We propose \textit{CASL-VAE}, a deep contrastive latent variable model that learns structured latent generative factors from unpaired data. CASL-VAE factorizes variation into continuous common latent factors shared across populations and hierarchical salient latent factors that model target-specific heterogeneity as discrete subtypes and continuous within-subtype variation. Using variational inference, we show how approximate joint likelihood optimization over reference and target domains can be performed using unpaired data, providing a principled basis for paired-sample generation and cross-domain analysis. We validate CASL-VAE on semi-synthetic neuroimaging data, demonstrating improved subtype recovery and paired-sample generation compared to baseline clustering and generative models. We also validate its ability to reveal biologically plausible heterogeneity in Alzheimer's disease.
Workload-Preserving Differentially Private Synthetic Data for Causal Inference via Maximum-Entropy Calibration
Workload-based differentially private (DP) synthetic data methods privately measure aggregate queries and post-process the noisy answers into synthetic records. Generic workloads can achieve strong distributional fidelity, but causal estimands such as the average treatment effect (ATE) depend on treatment-arm balance and outcome moments that generic marginals need not preserve. We propose causal workloads: DP query sets designed around the orthogonal moments used by doubly robust causal estimators. The released workload can be used directly by stable moment-map estimators or reconstructed by maximum-entropy calibration into reusable synthetic data; our theory decomposes ATE error into sampling, privacy, workload-approximation, Monte Carlo, and calibration terms. We also introduce Causal-AIM, an adaptive workload selector, and a noise-aware multiple-imputation (NA+MI) procedure for confidence intervals from DP synthetic data. Because the workload is released once, the same DP synthetic table can support ATE, ATT, and subgroup analyses without additional privacy spending. Empirically, causal workloads are most useful at strict privacy budgets and for calibrated uncertainty, while generic workloads often retain an advantage for point RMSE as privacy relaxes. The broader lesson is a tradeoff: distributional fidelity can help point accuracy, but valid causal inference requires preserving causal moments and propagating DP noise rather than treating synthetic rows as real.
Infinity-Parser2 Technical Report
We present Infinity-Parser2, a large multimodal model that couples a controllable data-synthesis pipeline with multi-task reinforcement learning for end-to-end document parsing, addressing the persistent scarcity of faithfully annotated parsing corpora. Our contributions are threefold. First, we build a scalable synthesis engine, pairing a controllable rendering framework with an iterative refinement loop, and use it to construct and open-source Infinity-Doc2-5M: a 5-million-sample bilingual (Chinese/English) corpus spanning diverse document types, annotated with element bounding boxes, canonical content forms (Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, SMILES, structured charts), and full-page reading order. Second, we introduce a verifiable, multi-task reward system that enables Joint Reinforcement Learning across eight co-trained objectives (document parsing, layout analysis, table parsing, math formula parsing, chart parsing, chemical formula parsing, document VQA, and general multimodal understanding), unifying perception, structure, and reasoning in a single optimization signal. Third, we release two variants under a shared architecture: Infinity-Parser2-Flash, optimized for low-latency inference with a 3.68x throughput gain over Infinity-Parser-7B, and Infinity-Parser2-Pro, engineered for precision-critical settings. Infinity-Parser2-Pro reaches state-of-the-art 87.6% on olmOCR-Bench and 74.3% on ParseBench, surpassing DeepSeek-OCR-2, PaddleOCR-VL-1.5, and MinerU2.5, with strong generalization to charts, chemical formulas, and document VQA.
Collaborative Synthetic Data Generation for Knowledge Transfer in Federated Learning
One-shot federated learning (OSFL) addresses the communication overhead of federated learning by limiting training to a single round, but doing so without sacrificing model quality is non-trivial, particularly when client data distributions diverge. Recent work has addressed this challenge by aggregating client knowledge on the server through the construction of transferable synthetic datasets or distillates. However, most of these methods lack formal privacy guarantees, leaving a gap in jointly achieving low communication, robustness to heterogeneity, and rigorous privacy. We propose FedKT-CSD (Federated Knowledge Transfer via Collaborative Synthetic Data), a framework inspired by neural image compression that closes this gap by leveraging publicly pretrained autoencoders as a shared latent space. Each client encodes its private data in a single forward pass, computes class-conditional latent statistics, and transmits these to the server. The server aggregates these statistics via secure aggregation, adds calibrated differential privacy noise, and decodes a synthetic dataset for training a global model and further downstream tasks. This design provides formal -differential privacy by construction, while keeping client-side computation and communication lightweight. Despite operating under privacy constraints, FedKT-CSD is competitive with and even outperforms non-private baselines across diverse datasets and heterogeneity settings, and scales to a large number of clients. Our code is available at: https://github.com/an7123/FedKT-CSD
Mitigating Domain Shift in Conditioned Floor Plan Generation: Synthetic Pre-training for Data-Efficient Adaptation
Robustness to domain shift is a key requirement for floor plan generative models to be applicable beyond the single dataset they were trained on, as floor plans vary widely across regions due to distinct architectural cultures, spatial constraints, and construction practices, while acquiring new annotated datasets remains costly and domain-specific. Yet, no prior work has studied this robustness in the context of conditioned floor plan generation. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models from two fundamentally different generative paradigms across three public datasets (RPLAN, MagicPlan and Swiss Dwellings) and show that they are highly sensitive to domain shift, with up to an order of magnitude performance degradation when transferred across domains. To mitigate this with minimal target-domain supervision, we introduce a procedural method to generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset that enforces strict physical constraints (non-overlapping rooms, valid door placement, graph consistency) while intentionally sacrificing architectural realism through highly irregular spatial arrangements and aggressive geometric perturbation of room shapes. We show that pre-training on this synthetic data considerably improves zero-shot cross-domain performance, outperforming in-domain training on MagicPlan. Furthermore, it provides a highly effective initialization for fine-tuning, accelerating target domain adaptation and outperforming real-world initialization baselines by up to 40% in a low-data regime.
Property-Driven Synthetic Data Engineering for Data-Scarce Software Systems: Reflections from the Breast Cancer Domain
Modern software systems increasingly depend on data for analysis, prediction, testing, and decision-making. Yet many important domains, including medicine, safety-critical systems, and regulated industries, lack abundant, shareable, or representative data. Synthetic data generation is often proposed as a remedy, but our experience engineering software for intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT) in breast cancer treatment suggests that synthetic data shifts rather than solves the central engineering problem. The key challenge becomes deciding which properties synthetic data must preserve, how these properties should be elicited from stakeholders, how they can be validated under privacy constraints, and how they evolve. We call this problem property-driven synthetic data engineering. Drawing on a collaboration with oncologists and preliminary experiments with a sensitive IORT dataset, we identify challenges in requirements, validation, privacy, and pipeline evolution. We argue that automated software engineering research should develop methods and tools for eliciting, formalizing, checking, and evolving validity properties for synthetic data in data-scarce software systems.
Creating Power Distribution Network Layouts Using Generative Adversarial Networks and Image-Based Representations
Utilities increasingly rely on planning and operational tools to cope with the increased penetrations of distributed energy resources, yet the lack of realistic, openly available datasets remains a major barrier for benchmarking and comparison. Traditional test feeders, and recently proposed large-scale synthetic networks alleviate this issue but are typically based on heuristic rules and do not learn directly from data. This paper proposes a generative framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create power distribution network layouts using image-based representations. The model is trained on rasterised views of distribution systems and can operate in two modes: an unconditional configuration that learns layout patterns from the training dataset, and conditional configurations that incorporate geographical context such as street maps and the spatial distribution of consumers. The methodology includes dataset preparation from Geographic Information System (GIS) sources, GAN architecture design, and the analysis of training stability and image resolution. Results from three representative cases show that the proposed approach can reproduce the topologies of low (LV), medium (MV) and high voltage (HV) feeders and align generated layouts with underlying geographical structures. At the same time, the study reveals limitations related to training stability, resolution-dependent artefacts and limits, and the absence of explicit electrical constraints. The proposed framework constitutes a data-driven complement to existing synthetic network generation methods, and could be applied to propose distribution network layouts for the electrification of new areas. This would require future extensions towards power flow, electrically validated models.
Realistic Compound-Lens Defocus Blur Synthesis
Defocus blur degrades fine image structures and limits visual perception, which can adversely affect downstream vision tasks. Although recent deep learning deblurring methods have achieved strong performance, their effectiveness depends on training data and often degrades across cameras and lenses due to limited optical diversity and realism in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for synthesizing realistic defocus deblurring datasets for diverse compound lenses. It integrates efficient wave-optics PSF computation via Debye CZT propagation, depth-aware defocus rendering with occlusion handling, and blur synthesis in the radiometrically linear space with camera ISP simulation. This unified pipeline enables the scalable generation of photorealistic defocus datasets with diverse lens characteristics. Using our pipeline, we generate CLDefocus, a large-scale synthetic dataset containing lens-diverse defocus image pairs. We further analyze the limitations of real-captured defocus datasets and show that such imperfections can bias full-reference evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on CLDefocus achieve improved cross-device generalization compared to models trained on existing real and synthetic datasets.
Synthetic Consumer Insight Generation with Large Language Models
Modern data-driven marketing relies on large amounts of consumer data, yet collecting such data can be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. This research examines whether large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate synthetic consumer data for projective techniques, a set of methods designed to elicit consumer associations, emotions, wants, and needs. We test LLM-generated responses across multiple projective tasks, LLMs, prompting strategies, and temperature settings, and compare them with human responses from a primary research study on perceptions of city tourism destinations. Human and LLM responses were analyzed using linguistic measures, diversity and concentration metrics, topic models, and top-term analyses. The results show substantial overlap between human and LLM responses in broad topics and associations, but also important differences in style, linguistic structure, and the way diversity is generated. Recommendations are given on how to best utilize LLMs for generating synthetic consumer data, how model and prompt choices shape response quality, and on recognizing the limitations of LLM synthetic consumer data generation.
InFlux++: Real and Synthetic Data for Estimating Dynamic Camera Intrinsics
Camera intrinsics are vital for recovering 3D structure from 2D video. However, most 3D algorithms assume fixed intrinsics throughout a video, an assumption that often fails for real-world in-the-wild videos. Consequently, estimating per-frame intrinsics from RGB images is critical for making 3D methods robust to videos with dynamic intrinsics. InFlux previously advanced this research direction by establishing the first real-world benchmark with per-frame ground truth intrinsics for dynamic intrinsics videos. Nevertheless, existing methods remain inaccurate due to two obstacles: (i) training data is scarce and lacks intrinsics diversity; and (ii) benchmarks, including InFlux, have limited scene and camera motion diversity, making it difficult to properly evaluate methods. To address both gaps, we present InFlux++, consisting of two components. InFlux++ Synth is a large-scale procedurally generated synthetic video dataset with 441K+ annotated frames from 1841 high-resolution videos, providing accurate per-frame ground truth intrinsics for training dynamic intrinsics prediction models; a subset also includes per-frame pose, depth, and normals. The videos feature rich intrinsics diversity through changes in camera zoom and focus, as well as dynamic objects and realistic rendering effects such as lens distortion and defocus blur. InFlux++ Real is a large-scale real-world benchmark that extends InFlux with 514K+ newly captured frames across 334 high-resolution videos, spanning a wider range of scenes and camera motions. Finetuning existing intrinsics prediction methods on InFlux++ Synth consistently improves focal length estimation across both InFlux++ Real and InFlux, suggesting that synthetic supervision is promising for RGB-based intrinsics prediction. For the dataset, benchmark, code, videos, submission instructions, and live leaderboard, please visit https://influx.cs.princeton.edu/ .
Enhancing Large Multimodal Models in Key Information Extraction via Scene-Aware Document Synthesis
Key Information Extraction (KIE) converts visually rich documents into structured data, but practical deployment remains challenging: strong performance often relies on costly on-server Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), while compact locally deployable models lack sufficient KIE supervision. We present SAYRE, a scene-aware document synthesis framework for generating scalable KIE training data without hand-crafted template design. Given a few exemplar documents, SAYRE captures category-specific content patterns and layout conventions to synthesize document-schema-annotation triples. It further introduces error-driven generation, which expands real-world failure cases into hard training examples while preserving their structural patterns. Experiments on constrained- and open-category KIE show that SAYRE consistently improves Qwen3-VL backbones and achieves the strongest overall performance among on-device LMMs. Data scaling experiments show an overall upward trend as more synthesized data is introduced, especially for smaller models and open-category extraction. Error analysis further shows that synthesized training reduces field-level errors by improving schema-aware extraction over dense tables, business identifiers, and contract clauses. These results establish scene-aware synthesis as an effective data-centric approach for improving practical multimodal KIE.
Signal or Noise? Understanding Generative Models for Real-World Sensor Time Series
Generative models have changed how machine learning represents complex data distributions, especially in language and vision, yet many real-world systems are observed instead as continuous, high-dimensional, and noisy sensor time series. Existing generative modeling of sensor data, however, remains fragmented across modalities, datasets, and task formulations, limiting a systematic understanding of when, how, and why generative models succeed or fail in real-world settings. To address this gap, we introduce SensorGen, a large-scale study of sensor-signal generation spanning 14 settings across 4 domains, 7 datasets, and 12 signal modalities. Leveraging SensorGen, we systematically evaluate generative models from five major families and uncover three key findings: (1) flow-matching models provide strong overall performance across most settings; (2) signal properties matter, with demographic covariates improving longitudinal generation and time-frequency modeling improving high-frequency signal generation; and (3) generated signals have practical utility beyond visual realism, with scaling improving generation quality and synthetic data improving downstream performance. Together, SensorGen establishes a broader understanding of design choices, evaluation protocols, and failure modes in real-world sensor data generation.
BAT3R: Bootstrapping Articulated 3D Reconstruction from 2D Image Collections
3D reconstruction of articulated objects from a single image is challenging because large training datasets with paired image and 3D supervision are difficult to obtain. Recent point map-based methods achieve strong performance but rely on synthetic datasets rendered from manually created articulated 3D assets with carefully curated pose distributions. While camera viewpoints can be easily sampled, generating realistic object articulations remains costly and labor-intensive. We propose a training framework that reduces this requirement by leveraging unannotated 2D images collections with only a single rigged canonical mesh per category. Starting from a weak 3D shape predictor trained on canonical-pose renders, we iteratively estimate object articulation and camera pose by fitting the mesh to predicted point maps. The recovered articulations and viewpoints are then used to render updated synthetic training data, progressively improving the predictor. Despite using substantially weaker 3D supervision, our models achieve performance comparable with DualPM, which requires manually curated articulated training datasets.
Task-Conditioned Synthetic Data Generation for Improving Machine Learning Performance in Agricultural Prediction Tasks
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have been widely used to estimate agricultural variables across diverse contexts. However, because the quantity and quality of training data strongly influence performance of ML algorithms, their use can be constrained by limited or incomplete reference data. Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) offers a practical approach to address this issue by producing artificial but realistic samples that preserve key characteristics of the original data. Building on teacher-student knowledge transfer and in-context learning for tabular data, this study proposes a Task-Conditioned SDG (TCSDG) algorithm that pairs a Bayesian Network generator with a transformer-based tabular foundation model (TabICL). The proposed algorithm was evaluated on two agricultural prediction tasks: crop yield prediction and crop type classification. Six benchmark SDG algorithms were also utilized to compare their performance with that of TCSDG. Across twelve study sites, two training-data fractions, four multiplication ratios, and three predictive ML algorithms, augmenting the original data with TCSDG-generated synthetic data improved ML performance in 89% of the crop type classification experiments and 74% of the crop yield prediction experiments. TCSDG also substantially outperformed benchmark SDG algorithms and was the only method to consistently improve ML performance across both tasks at the aggregate level. The study demonstrates that carefully designed and processed synthetic data can improve ML performance in precision-agriculture applications. TCSDG offers a practical and extensible framework for generating synthetic data that supports downstream ML agricultural prediction. The full implementation of TCSDG is publicly available as open source at https://github.com/HamidEbrahimy/TCSDG.