Synthetic Data Generation
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43 papers in the last four weeks, up 59% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.
Latest papers 417
Full waveform inversion (FWI) is the gold standard for subsurface imaging, with applications from carbon sequestration to energy and mineral exploration to earthquake hazard assessment. Machine learning approaches to FWI need field-scale, geologically diverse, and physically realistic training data, but existing resources such as Marmousi, SEAM, and OpenFWI fall short on spatial extent, temporal extent, geological diversity, and physical realism. We address these limitations with SubsurfaceGen, a GPU-accelerated generator for 3D velocity models and seismic data. Along with SubsurfaceGen, we release a paired dataset of 4,276 2D velocity slices, 5 s wavefields, and 8 s shot gathers drawn from 42 realistic, field-scale 3D velocity models, each spanning 10 km x 10 km laterally and 6.19 km deep at 10 m resolution. The dataset spans six geological settings -- four built with SubsurfaceGen and two drawn from prior sources -- relevant for carbon sequestration and hydrocarbon exploration. We use this dataset to evaluate neural operators on wavefield prediction and encoder-decoders on end-to-end velocity inversion, holding out one geological setting for out-of-distribution testing. These experiments surface failure modes at field-scale and demonstrate how SubsurfaceGen and the associated dataset can impact ML-based FWI.
Domain-Specific Data Synthesis for LLMs via Minimal Sufficient Representation Learning
Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable progress in general-purpose capabilities and can achieve strong performance in specific domains through fine-tuning on domain-specific data. However, acquiring high-quality data for target domains remains a significant challenge. Existing data synthesis approaches follow a deductive paradigm, heavily relying on explicit domain descriptions expressed in natural language and careful prompt engineering, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where domains are difficult to describe or formally articulate. In this work, we tackle the underexplored problem of domain-specific data synthesis through an inductive paradigm, where the target domain is defined only through a set of reference examples, particularly when domain characteristics are difficult to articulate in natural language. We propose a novel framework, DOMINO, that learns a minimal sufficient domain representation from reference samples and leverages it to guide the generation of domain-aligned synthetic data. DOMINO integrates prompt tuning with a contrastive disentanglement objective to separate domain-level patterns from sample-specific noise, mitigating overfitting while preserving core domain characteristics. Theoretically, we prove that DOMINO expands the support of the synthetic data distribution, ensuring greater diversity. Empirically, on challenging coding benchmarks where domain definitions are implicit, fine-tuning on data synthesized by DOMINO improves Pass@1 accuracy by up to 4.63% over strong, instruction-tuned backbones, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. This work establishes a new paradigm for domain-specific data synthesis, enabling practical and scalable domain adaptation without manual prompt design or natural language domain specifications.
From GPS Points to Travel Patterns: Flexible and Semantic Trajectory Generation with LLMs
Urban trajectories play a crucial role in modeling urban dynamics and supporting various smart city applications. However, privacy concerns restrict access to large-scale and high-quality trajectory datasets. Trajectory generation provides a promising alternative by synthesizing realistic data to mitigate privacy risks. However, existing methods fail to explicitly capture travel patterns and can only generate fixed-length trajectories under a single condition. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{HTP}, which \textbf{H}ierarchically generates \textbf{T}ravel patterns first and then generates GPS \textbf{P}oints by using large language models (LLMs), rather than directly generating GPS points. We first design a trajectory-specific residual quantization variational autoencoder (RQ-VAE) that quantizes micro-level GPS trajectories into compact, macro-level travel pattern tokens in a coarse-to-fine manner. These tokens capture rich segment spatial irregularities, such as point density variations caused by traffic conditions. Then, we extend the LLM vocabulary with travel pattern tokens to align trajectory representations with the LLM input, and apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align the LLM with the trajectory generation task, enabling generation of travel pattern sequences under various conditions. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that HTP outperforms the strongest baseline by an average of 29.78% in terms of generation quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/slzhou-xy/HTP.
TraceCodec: A Compiler-Backed Neural Codec for Stateful Multi-Flow Network Traffic Traces
Critical networking workflows require high-fidelity packet captures (PCAPs) for testing, security analysis, and protocol validation, not just statistical flow-level summaries. Recent packet generators have demonstrated protocol-constrained PCAP synthesis, but they universally decode directly to raw packet fields. That interface entangles learned behavioral choices with deterministic protocol consequences, which forces packet realization to depend on post-hoc heuristic repair. We identify this decode interface as the fundamental bottleneck and present TraceCodec, a state-aware neural codec for stateful multi-flow traces. TraceCodec lifts each packet into a timed packet action with explicit flow slots and transport cues, then learns a continuous per-packet latent. A deterministic compiler lowers decoded actions back to PCAPs, owning endpoint assignment, TCP state, legality constraints, and packet rendering. The latent layer exposes a generator-facing sequence space, so downstream traffic models can operate on packet-action latents rather than raw header fields. On CICIDS2017 Monday, TraceCodec matches packet count, protocol composition, and flow population to within 0.03%. Raw-field baselines under the same non-repair policy distort flow counts and TCP state by orders of magnitude. Structural diagnostics show that TraceCodec preserves TCP state transitions and multi-flow interleaving that raw-field decoders fragment. This work establishes a new foundation for high-fidelity packet-trace generation.
Make LLM Learn to Synthesize from Streaming Experiences through Feedback
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted for synthetic data generation, significantly reducing annotation costs. However, most existing studies treat synthesis as a set of isolated tasks and overlook a more fundamental question: whether a model can learn to synthesize by accumulating experience from past tasks and transferring it to future ones. In this work, we introduce StreamSynth, a new setting in which synthesis tasks arrive sequentially and experience from historical tasks provides informative signals for future synthesis. To address this setting, we propose SynLearner, a general framework that enables synthesis models to acquire reusable synthesis experience over a task stream. Instead of generating data independently for each task, SynLearner encourages the model to explore diverse synthesis patterns, learn from feedback, and balance sample quality with set-level diversity as tasks evolve. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SynLearner effectively leverages experience from earlier tasks to improve synthesis performance on later ones, exhibiting consistent cross-task transferability. These findings provide evidence for the feasibility of StreamSynth and highlight synthetic data generation as an experience-driven process that can benefit from task streams.
CityGen: Structure-Guided City-Style Synthesis for Cross-City Autonomous Driving
Autonomous driving systems are commonly trained and evaluated within limited geographic regions, which hinders their scalability when deployed in new cities. However, significant domain shifts in appearance, road topology, and traffic patterns often cause severe performance degradation under cross-city deployment. Existing approaches based on domain adaptation, data augmentation, or synthetic data generation typically rely on labeled target data, city-specific annotations, or task-specific designs, limiting their scalability and effectiveness for holistic evaluation. In this paper, we introduce CityTransfer-Bench, a geographically disjoint benchmark for evaluating cross-city generalization across perception, segmentation, and planning, and propose CityGen, a diffusion-based generative framework that performs zero-label city adaptation via HD-map-conditioned synthesis guided by city-level visual prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CityGen consistently improves cross-city robustness across multiple tasks, establishing a scalable and label-efficient foundation for generalizable autonomous driving.
BuilDyn: Excitation-Driven Data Generation for Building Thermal Dynamics Modeling and Control
Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used for data-driven modeling of buildings to enable downstream tasks such as fault detection and diagnosis, and energy-efficient control. While recent work improves generalization across building characteristics, weather, and occupancy, generalization also depends on sufficient exploration of the control-driven system state space. Existing real-world datasets and simulation environments predominantly reflect stationary operation under fixed control policies, resulting in limited excitation and reduced robustness to unseen operating conditions. This paper introduces BuilDyn, a package based on BuilDa that enables customizable excitation strategies for control-oriented data generation. BuilDyn further supports sampling from representative building distributions and provides a Python interface for easy integration into machine learning pipelines. We demonstrate the benefits of BuilDyn by comparing the performance of data-driven ML models trained on non-excited and excited data for one building. With BuilDyn, we hope to advance scalable control-oriented modeling and support future directions such as transfer learning and building-specific foundation models.
MARTIAN: A Rendering Framework for Aerial Mars Imagery from HiRISE Orbital Data
Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of large-scale, annotated aerial datasets. We present MARTIAN, an open-source Blender-based rendering framework that leverages real HiRISE orbital map products to synthesize realistic aerial views of the Martian terrain under controllable lighting conditions and at varying altitudes. MARTIAN generates observations with accurate pose annotations, directly addressing the scarcity of training data for vision-based navigation on Mars. The framework has been validated through its deployment in concurrent work on map-based localization systems for Ingenuity and future Mars rotorcraft, where synthetically trained deep image matchers were successfully evaluated on real Mars imagery. MARTIAN is publicly available at: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/martian.
GPS-Enhanced Tourist Mobility Modeling with Seasonal Spatial Priors and LLM-Based Activity Chain Generation
Tourist mobility poses a distinct challenge for urban transportation planning. Unlike resident commuting, tourist travel is largely non-routine, attraction driven, and highly sensitive to trip purpose, travel season, and trip member composition. Existing approaches either measure aggregate tourist spatial patterns without generating individual schedules, or synthesize mobility without tourist specific structure such as trip duration conditioning, month varying attraction demand, and household co-travel rules. To address these challenges, we propose a four stage simulation framework combining month conditioned spatial priors derived from GPS and survey data, trip extent prediction from tourist demographics, distance feasible ward sequence assignment, and LLM-based activity chain generation under household and spatial constraints. GPS data are used only in privacy preserving aggregated form as month conditioned spatial priors, with no individual traces retained or exposed. Experiments on tourism in Tokyo demonstrate that the GPS based tourist cohort extraction recovers spatial visitation signatures consistent with survey references, and our framework produces demographically aligned synthetic schedules whose ward-level visitation shares align closely with both survey distributions and staypoint derived monthly visitation patterns. The results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness as a geographically grounded, demographically aware approach to tourist mobility modeling.
Error as a Lens: Probing LLM Reasoning through Synthetic Misconception Generation
Personalized tutoring, teacher training, and education research need access to \emph{targeted} synthetic misconceptions, but privacy and IRB constraints make labelled corpora of real student errors scarce. LLMs could in principle generate synthetic errors at scale, but producing an arbitrary wrong answer is easy for a modern LLM while producing one that matches a specified cognitive failure mode is much harder. We present a framework that generates errors targeted to a five-class taxonomy adapted from the revised Bloom's taxonomy, evaluated on questions from the TheoremQA dataset. A Generation Agent (GA) drafts a candidate erroneous solution conditioned on a target class, and an Examination Agent (EA) judges whether the draft is incorrect and class-consistent. The framework yields a reusable recipe for building class-stratified synthetic error datasets where authentic student corpora are unavailable. As a secondary diagnostic, targeted error generation is substantially harder than free-form incorrect-answer generation, and answer-grounding contributes more than expanded examples or external textbook content.
Learn from Weaknesses: Automated Domain Specialization for Small Computer-Use Agents
Computer-use agents (CUAs) have recently made substantial progress, but deploying a separate large expert for each software domain remains expensive. Small open computer-use agents are more practical specialization targets, but they remain substantially weaker and exhibit uneven domain-specific failures. A straightforward remedy is to synthesize large-scale training data for the target domain, yet we find that this naive approach yields only marginal improvements. Building on this observation, we introduce LearnWeak, an annotation-free specialization framework for small computer-use agents that uses a stronger reference agent to identify the student's weaknesses in the target domain, synthesize targeted tasks, and construct supervision automatically. LearnWeak further introduces an error-aware specialization objective that disentangles planning and execution errors, enabling more behaviorally precise updates than broad uniform supervision. On OSWorld, LearnWeak achieves average gains of 11.6 and 11.1 percentage points over EvoCUA-8B and OpenCUA-7B, respectively, across eight domains. We also validate that our student-aware dataset generation and training approaches outperform existing autonomous trajectory generation and training baselines. Our work highlights the importance of student awareness in both data synthesis and agent training, pointing toward a more principled and efficient path for specializing small computer-use agents in diverse domains.
Activation Steering for Synthetic Data Generation: The Role of Diversity in Downstream Safety Detection
Safety detection models require examples of HHH (Helpful, Harmless, Honest)-violating outputs for robust generalization, however such examples are scarce. Activation Steering (AS) has emerged as a data-efficient method for generating target-concept-aligned responses. We investigate whether AS can generate high-quality training datasets for downstream classifiers, a question that remains untested. We present a two-fold study with intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation across concepts models steering methods. Intrinsically, beyond the field-standard rubric of steering success (concept alignment) and coherence, we introduce sample- and set-level diversity as a quality axis previously absent from the literature, and find that increasing steering strength reduces response diversity. Extrinsically, we replace HHH-violating examples in the available training data with steered generations and fine-tune detection classifiers. AS-generated data results in a better classifier than the prompting-generated data on of concepts. However, only of AS configurations outperform prompting, indicating that downstream utility lies in a narrow regime that jointly satisfies success, coherence, and diversity. The harmonic mean of these three axes correlates with downstream AUROC more consistently across concepts than success and coherence alone, providing a practical heuristic target for practitioners tuning AS hyperparameters. Together, our results highlight the potential of AS in synthetic data generation for improving safety detection and identify diversity as a critical, previously overlooked axis for tuning AS.
Hierarchical Synthetic Tabular Data Generation: A Hybrid Top-Down and Bottom-Up Framework
Existing approaches for synthetic tabular data generation are based on either purely generative models or LLMs, both of which struggle with data heterogeneity, logical consistency, rare-event coverage, and robustness in low-data regimes. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical hybrid top-down and bottom-up (H-TDBU) framework that decouples semantic structures from stochastic texture. In the top-down path, structure-driven logical constraints and cross-modal alignment rules are constructed, while in the bottom-up path, lightweight tabular generators are used to learn local statistical patterns from real data. The two paths are consolidated in a unified synthesis engine with an iterative feedback loop. We evaluate the framework on weak multimodal financial benchmarks combining tabular and sentiment-text data. Experimental results show that our H-TDBU approach improves train-synthetic-test-real performance over neural baseline methods while preserving semantic consistency. Our results suggest that hierarchical rule-guided synthesis provides an effective mechanism for combining controllability, semantic coherence, and statistical fidelity in synthetic data generation.
FedEHR-Gen: Federated Synthetic Time-Series EHR Generation via Latent Space Alignment and Distribution-Aware Aggregation
Synthetic Electronic Health Record (EHR) generation provides a promising avenue for data augmentation and cross-hospital modeling in privacy-constrained healthcare settings. However, most existing EHR generative models are centralized and require pooling data across hospitals, which is often infeasible when real-world data sharing is restricted. While federated EHR generation offers a natural solution, direct federated modeling often collapses or diverges due to the high dimensionality, sparsity, and cross-hospital heterogeneity of EHR data. In this work, we propose FedEHR-Gen, the first federated framework for synthetic time-series EHR generation across distributed hospitals. FedEHR-Gen uses a two-stage learning paradigm. First, we introduce a federated autoencoder that projects high-dimensional and sparse EHR features onto a compact latent space. To ensure semantic consistency across hospitals, we develop a layer-wise matching aggregation mechanism that aligns local encoders into a unified global latent space. Second, operating on this aligned latent space, we train a federated temporal conditional variational autoencoder (TCVAE) with distribution-aware aggregation, enabling stable temporal generative modeling under severe cross-hospital heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on the eICU and MIMIC-III datasets demonstrate that FedEHR-Gen achieves generation fidelity, downstream utility, and privacy risk comparable to centralized training, while consistently outperforming the standard federated baseline.
Representation-Conditioned Diffusion Models for Guided Training Data Generation
Data availability remains a critical bottleneck in many deep learning applications. Large-scale datasets are often expensive to collect, curate and annotate, which can limit the scalability and applicability of supervised learning methods. In this work, we evaluate the classification performance of models trained on synthetic image datasets produced by generative deep learning. In particular, we use latent diffusion models conditioned on learned representations from DINOv2, DINOv3, and CLIP. Our results demonstrates that this representation-conditioned formulation significantly outperforms class-conditioned generation by a large margin (+10.76 p.p. top-1 accuracy on ImageNet100), by improving sample quality and mode coverage. Furthermore, by scaling the size of the synthetic dataset, we are able to outperform a classifier trained on the real data (+2.0 p.p top-1 accuracy). We also demonstrate how generated images can be used for augmentation purposes, outperforming classical augmentation methods, and how the conditioning space can be used for sample filtering to further improve training value. Collectively, these findings highlight that representation-conditioned diffusion models provide a promising approach for augmenting, complementing, or potentially replacing real-world datasets in large-scale visual learning tasks.
High-Quality Synthetic Financial Time-Series using a GAN-Diffusion Framework
In recent years, financial institutions and firms have increasingly adopted synthetic data to address data scarcity and to generate counterfactual market scenarios. However, reproducing all the statistical properties of financial time series, commonly known as stylized facts, remains an open challenge for many existing general-purpose architectures. In this paper, we present a quality-aware generative framework that combines two classes of generative methods, demonstrating how their integration addresses existing limitations while enhancing the realism of synthetic data. Specifically, we first introduce CoMeTS-GAN (Correlated Multivariate Time Series GAN), a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (C-GAN) designed to jointly generate mid-price and volume time-series for correlated stocks. We then show how our GAN architecture can be incorporated into state-of-the-art diffusion models to enhance the quality of generated correlation structures. Specifically, the GAN's Critic serves as a quality evaluation module that guides the diffusion process, enforcing learned correlation structures in the generated time-series. Our framework offers a lightweight and responsive solution for realistic stock market simulation, explicitly modeling inter-asset correlation structures. We experimentally validate our framework against leading generative architectures, showing that it more effectively captures the stylized facts of stock markets and models inter-asset correlations.
Generating Logically Consistent Synthetic Supply Chain Data with LLM-Driven Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Synthetic data offers a promising solution to two persistent barriers in supply chain analytics: data scarcity and data privacy. However, for synthetic data to support operational simulation and decision-making, it must do more than reproduce the statistical distributions of real records, and also preserve the \emph{operational logic} that governs supply chain processes, including the temporal orderings, mathematical dependencies, hierarchical taxonomies, and conditional rules that make a record operationally plausible. We consider this logic as the ``physics'' of supply chain data. Existing tabular generative models are primarily optimized for distributional fidelity and downstream predictive utility, and therefore often generate records that appear statistically realistic but violate fundamental operational constraints. This paper introduces \textbf{\textit{TabKG}}, a knowledge-graph-guided framework for logically consistent synthetic supply chain tabular data generation. TabKG constructs a \textbf{\textit{Column Relationship Knowledge Graph (CR-KG)}} to represent data operational dependencies. It uses a multi-LLM ensemble with majority voting to propose candidate relationships from column metadata, validates these relationships against real data to remove hallucinated or unsupported edges, and then uses the validated CR-KG to guide generation. Specifically, TabKG compresses the original table into independent columns, generates these columns using a latent diffusion model, and deterministically reconstructs dependent columns according to the validated relationships, enforcing logical consistency by construction with respect to the discovered operational rules.
FM-fMRI: Event Conditioned Flow Matching for Rest-to-Task fMRI Time-Series Synthesis
Task-based fMRI provides a direct readout of task-evoked neural dynamics, but it is expensive and difficult to acquire at scale, motivating rest-to-task synthesis from widely available resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI). We propose FM-fMRI, an event-conditioned flow-matching model that learns a continuous-time conditional vector field to generate task ROI time series from a subject's rsfMRI and the task event information. The formulation enables fast ODE-based sampling and flexible conditioning over heterogeneous event schedules. Rather than optimizing for pointwise reconstruction, we evaluated generated signals using complementary criteria that probe temporal and spectral structure, subject and group-level connectome consistency, and distributional alignment. On the public Human Connectome Project and internal BioPoint autism cohort, FM-fMRI achieves the strongest spectral and connectivity agreement and improved distribution-level matching over conditional diffusion, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and variational autoencoders (VAEs) baselines. Furthermore, we augment the BioPoint cohort by synthesizing task-fMRI ROI time series with our method, improving downstream autism classification and demonstrating practical utility in data-limited clinical settings. The code will be available on GitHub.
CUA-Gym: Scaling Verifiable Training Environments and Tasks for Computer-Use Agents
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven breakthroughs in domains such as math, tool-use, and software engineering, yet its extension to computer-use agents (CUAs) has been bottlenecked by the scarcity of scalable training data with deterministic rewards. Constructing such data for CUAs requires consistent task instruction, executable environment, and verifiable reward. However, hand-curated benchmarks achieve high reward fidelity but cover few applications and LLM-as-judge-based datasets scale broadly but lack reliable verification. We present CUA-Gym, a scalable pipeline that co-generates task instructions, environment states, and reward functions. Concretely, a Generator agent constructs the initial and golden environment states, and a separate Discriminator agent writes the reward function from the task specification. An orchestrator agent drives the two through iterative rounds upon execution. Generated tuples then pass a final filter combining LLM majority voting and agent rollouts, ensuring quality beyond the per-task adversarial loop. To address the scarcity of training environments, we further synthesize CUA-Gym-Hub, a broad suite of high-fidelity mock web applications grounded in real-world software-use distributions, expanding the scale of CUA RLVR data by magnitude. Using this pipeline, we construct CUA-Gym, a dataset of 32,112 verified RLVR training tuples grounded in 110 environments. Trained with GSPO on CUA-Gym, our CUA-Gym-A3B and CUA-Gym-A17B achieve 62.1% and 72.6% on OSWorld-Verified, outperforming prior open-source CUAs at comparable scales, with performance scaling smoothly in both data volume and environment diversity. The same checkpoints also improve on the held-out WebArena benchmark, indicating transfer beyond the training environments. We will open-source the full synthesis pipeline, dataset, CUA-Gym-Hub environments, and models.
TRACE: A taxonomy-grounded synthetic dataset for teaching-program generation and session interpretation in Applied Behavior Analysis
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a clinical discipline whose documentation, teaching programs and multi-session behavioral logs, is formulaic and high-volume, yet real session data is HIPAA-protected and bound by professional confidentiality rules, blocking the release of a training corpus. We present TRACE (Taxonomy-Referenced ABA Clinical Examples), a 2,999-example synthetic instruction-tuning dataset covering two ABA tasks: teaching-program generation across Discrete Trial Training, Natural Environment Teaching, and Task Analysis; and multi-session behavioral interpretation across twelve trajectory patterns and thirteen target behaviors. Every example is produced by a deterministic taxonomy-driven generator grounded in the canonical ABA literature, and every example carries complete sampling provenance, the exact taxonomy cells that produced it. The dataset is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for data and MIT for code, with stratified train (2,549), validation (149), test (281), and sanity (20) splits. TRACE is a research artifact and has not been clinically validated.
ARCANE-PedSynth: Synthetic Multi-Pedestrian Datasets with Behavioural Crossing Annotations
We present ARCANE-PedSynth, an open-source CARLA-based software framework for generating synthetic multi-pedestrian datasets with dense behavioural annotations for pedestrian crossing prediction in autonomous driving. The framework overcomes CARLA's native 9% crossing rate through a hybrid AI-manual pedestrian control architecture, enabling configurable target rates up to 75%. A 12-state behavioural finite state machine with five character archetypes produces diverse crossing behaviours. The framework generates synchronised RGB, LiDAR, and DVS data with per-frame crossing labels, behavioural states, and estimated 2D pose keypoints. We demonstrate ARCANE-PedSynth through PedSynth++, an example dataset generated with the framework, comprising 533 multi-pedestrian clips across 12 weather conditions with RGB, LiDAR, and DVS streams. ARCANE-PedSynth is fully reproducible via CLI parameterisation and Docker containerisation.
PGT: Procedurally Generated Tasks for improving visual grounding in MLLMs
Despite remarkable progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), these models still struggle with fine-grained understanding tasks. In this work, we propose Procedurally Generated Tasks (PGT), a simple data-driven framework that serves a dual purpose: inducing fine-grained visual understanding and acting as a low-cost diagnostic tool to identify the source of perception failures. By overlaying unambiguous geometric primitives on images, PGT generate additional dense supervision that disentangles visual grounding capability from semantic priors. Extensive experiments on relational, quantitative, and 3D/depth understanding benchmarks show that PGT yields remarkable gains across diverse architectures. Instruction tuning MLLMs on LLaVA-v1.5-Instruct augmented with PGT data results in improvements of up to +20% on the What'sUp benchmark and +13.3% on CV-Bench-2D, while maintaining general perception capabilities. Moreover, finetuning state-of-the-art MLLMs on PGT data leads to boosts of up to +5.5% on What'sUp and +8.3% on CV-Bench-2D. These findings demonstrate that PGT effectively address the bottleneck of fine-grained perception, revealing that many spatial reasoning deficits stem from inadequate supervision signals rather than inherent architectural or resolution limitations.
Synthetic Data Alone is Enough? Rethinking Data Scarcity in Pediatric Rare Disease Recognition
Children with rare genetic diseases often exhibit distinctive facial phenotypes, yet developing computer vision systems for early diagnosis remains challenging due to extreme data scarcity, privacy constraints, and limited data sharing in pediatric settings. These challenges not only hinder automated diagnosis but also restrict the availability of visual resources for clinical genetic counseling. While prior work has shown that synthetic data can augment real datasets and preserve phenotype-level semantics, it remains unclear whether synthetic data alone is sufficient for learning in ultra-low-resource pediatric settings. In this work, we study the synthetic-only regime for pediatric rare disease recognition. Under a controlled experimental setup, models are trained exclusively on phenotype-aware synthetic facial images at increasing scales. We find that synthetic-only training achieves performance comparable to real-data-only baselines at sufficient scale across multiple backbones, suggesting that high-fidelity synthetic data can approximate clinically meaningful distributions. These findings together further enable the use of synthetic pediatric facial images as privacy-preserving resources for genetic education and counseling, supporting clinician training and patient communication. Our results highlight the potential of computer vision to improve data efficiency and expand accessible visual tools in children's healthcare.
Cell Phantom Video Generation in Elliptical Fourier Descriptor Domain
Training Deep Neural Networks for tracking individual cells in biomedical videos requires a large amount of annotated data. The annotation of videos for cell tracking is very time consuming and often requires domain expertise; this explains the limited availability of public annotated data to address important medical problems like tissue repair or cancer treatment. Generating synthetic videos along with their Ground Truth annotations is a promising solution that relies, as a foundational first step, on the synthesis of single cell annotations (or phantoms). Phantoms need to be time consistent, as they have to replicate biological processes that are specific to the cell types. In this work, we propose a novel framework for generating videos of cell phantoms in the Elliptical Fourier Descriptors (EFDs) domain, a compact and geometrically interpretable representation for 2D closed contours. We represent the cell phantom evolution as a multivariate time series of EFD coefficients, introducing a strong prior for cell morphology and enabling the efficient generation of sequences that evolve coherently in time. Our experimental validation proves that modelling the temporal evolution in EFD space enables the generation of biologically plausible phantom videos. Our method can be used in generative pipelines for synthesizing annotated data for cell tracking, thus strongly mitigating the annotation effort for creating new datasets. Our code is available for download here: https://github.com/FrancescoBenedetto99/efd-cell-video-gen.
GazePrior: Zero-Shot AR/VR Eye Tracking via Learned 3D Gaze Reconstruction
Eye tracking (ET) is a foundational technology for advanced AR/VR applications. However, training ET models for every new ET device is challenging: real data collection is costly and time-consuming, while existing synthetic data generation methods lack realism. To remove the need for additional data collection while maintaining data quality, we introduce a data-driven 3D prior that models the distribution of human eyes across diverse identities, gaze directions, and light settings. This model, which we coin GazePrior, then enables sparse-input 3D reconstruction of annotated data collected with previous ET devices, which can in turn be rendered from the cameras of any target ET device. Our approach synthesizes data with the realism, diversity and ground-truth accuracy of real data collection without its prohibitive costs. Our experiments demonstrate that ET models trained with our synthesized data outperform previous zero-shot methods, achieving higher accuracy and robustness.
MindLoom: Composing Thought Modes for Frontier-Level Reasoning Data Synthesis
Although LLMs have made substantial progress in reasoning, systematically producing frontier-level reasoning data remains difficult. Existing synthesis methods often have limited visibility into the structural factors that govern problem difficulty, which can result in narrow diversity and unstable difficulty control. In this work, we view the difficulty of a reasoning problem as arising from the accumulation of atomic knowledge-reasoning transformations, which we term thought modes. Building on this perspective, we propose MindLoom, a framework for synthesizing frontier-level reasoning data through compositional thought mode engineering. Given a collection of hard problems with verified solutions, MindLoom first decomposes those solutions into thought mode chains that reveal each problem's construction logic. It then trains a retrieval model that matches problem states to compatible thought modes, providing guidance on which reasoning challenges to introduce during synthesis. New problems are composed by iteratively applying retrieved thought modes to seed questions, with distribution-aligned sampling to encourage diverse reasoning coverage. Finally, a rollout-based judging stage labels generated questions by difficulty and supplies judged-correct responses for supervised fine-tuning. We evaluate MindLoom on nine benchmarks covering five STEM disciplines and four mathematical reasoning tasks across multiple model families and sizes. Models fine-tuned on MindLoom-generated data achieves favorable performances over base models, distillation, and external-data baselines across the reported benchmarks. Ablation studies indicate the contribution of each component, and further analysis suggests that MindLoom covers a broad range of reasoning patterns while maintaining useful difficulty control. We have open-sourced our implementation at https://github.com/EachSheep/MindLoom.
OpenSeisML: Open Large-Scale Real Seismic and well-log Dataset for Generative AI
The advent of machine learning (ML) and computer vision has significantly accelerated seismic inversion workflows by reducing the computational cost of traditionally expensive iterative methods. However, the development and evaluation of ML methods remain limited by the scarcity of realistic velocity models, as most high-quality data are privately owned by oil and gas companies. To address this gap, we present OpenSeisML, a collection of real seismic datasets designed to support generative AI (Gen-AI) workflows for seismic inversion. The datasets are curated from publicly available surveys in the UK National Data Repository (NDR). When seismic volumes are in the time domain and wells are in depth, a time-to-depth conversion is required. We use checkshot data to establish the time-depth relationship and construct a velocity model through interpolation for accurate conversion of post-stack seismic data. Here, we present an automated data curation pipeline that enables seismic data preparation while ensuring reproducibility. The objective is to train a generative model that captures the statistical distribution of subsurface properties, enabling the synthesis of multiple statistically consistent realizations for uncertainty quantification which can act as a prior for seismic inversion.
A 10,000-Year Global Stochastic Tropical Cyclone Catalog with Wind-Dependent Track Transitions (WHITS)
Reliable assessment of tropical cyclone risk is limited by the short and spatially uneven historical record, especially for rare, high-intensity landfalls that dominate insured loss. We present WHITS, the Wind-focused Hurricane Interactive Track Simulator, a non-parametric semi-Markov model that generates a 10,000-year global synthetic catalog of tropical cyclone tracks. WHITS builds new storms by resampling variable-length segments of historical tracks, with segment choices conditioned on local wind speed, location, storm age, and forward motion. This structure preserves both the statistical grounding of the historical record and a form of system memory along realized storm pathways. The resulting catalog reproduces observed track density and the annual probability that hurricane- or typhoon-force winds pass a given location across the major tropical cyclone basins. WHITS is designed to support climate risk analysis, insurance applications, and extreme event research over operational planning time scales by providing a large, low-bias sample of physically plausible storms. This low-bias design is important for applications in which introduced bias cannot simply be corrected after the fact and small errors in storm frequency, track, or intensity can substantially affect loss estimates. Because loss accumulates along the storm path, track geometry matters: storms that loop, stall, or turn sharply can produce damage footprints that differ fundamentally from straight-moving events. By preserving these irregular shapes while greatly expanding the sample of plausible storms, WHITS provides risk analysts, insurers, and coastal planners with information unavailable from observations alone.
Physics-informed simulation framework for realistic sonar image generation and statistical validation
Synthetic sonar datasets offer a scalable alternative to costly real-world acquisition, yet their utility remains limited by the absence of rigorous quantitative validation. We present ACOUSIM (ACOustic SIMulation and Validation Platform), a physics-informed framework that evaluates the statistical alignment between synthetic and real sonar imagery without relying on generative models. A Gazebo-based environment generates sonar-like images by explicitly controlling seabed texture, illumination-driven shadowing, platform altitude, and noise. Realism is quantified against two public sonar datasets, SeabedObjects-KLSG-II and Sonar Common Target Detection (SCTD), using global intensity and local texture (LBP) distributions assessed via Kullback-Leibler divergence, Jensen-Shannon divergence, and Earth Mover's Distance. Results show strong texture alignment (KL < 0.07) across all classes, with plane-class intensity alignment outperforming ship-class due to shadow geometry complexity. ACOUSIM establishes a reproducible, distribution-level baseline for sim-to-real sonar evaluation and directly supports reliable dataset validation for underwater image analysis.
Component-Aware Structure-Preserving Style Transfer for Satellite Visual Sim2Real Data Construction
For camera-based satellite visual sensing, Sim2Real data construction requires images that approach real-domain sensor appearance while retaining the annotations inherited from simulation. Real sensor images of satellite targets with reliable pose labels and component-level masks are difficult to acquire at scale, whereas synthetic rendering provides exact geometric annotations but suffers from a visible appearance gap. This paper presents a component-aware structure-preserving style transfer framework for satellite visual synthetic-to-real data construction. The method builds weakly paired real--synthetic samples from calibrated real acquisition, ArUco-based camera-pose measurement, CAD rendering, and component masks. It then extracts part-wise real-domain style codes from unlabeled real images and injects them into corresponding synthetic satellite regions through mask-aligned modulation. To keep the generated images usable for downstream sensor-data supervision, adversarial training is combined with local contrastive consistency, self-regularization, and edge-preserving constraints. Experiments are conducted on 5,000 rendered satellite images and 100 real images captured in a calibrated setup. The real images provide target-domain appearance references and final evaluation images, while the downstream GDRNet pose estimator is trained only on synthetic or translated synthetic images. Compared with representative image-translation baselines, the proposed method achieves the lowest image distribution discrepancy, with an FID of 54.32 and a KID of 0.048. When the translated data are used to train GDRNet in this target-domain adaptation setting, the ADD pass rate improves to 0.260 and the AUC improves to 0.611. These results indicate that component-level appearance transfer can improve annotation-preserving satellite visual Sim2Real data generation in the considered calibrated setup.