arXiv Machine Learning

From Fake to Real: Pretraining on Balanced Synthetic Images to Prevent Spurious Correlations in Image Recognition

arXiv:2308. 04553v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual recognition models are prone to learning spurious correlations induced by a biased training set where certain conditions $B$ (\eg, Indoors) are over-represented in certain classes $Y$ (\eg, Big Dogs).

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Demographically-Conditioned Synthetic Medical Images for Bias Mitigation and Bias Detection in Disease Classifiers

arXiv:2607. 14984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-subgroup fairness audits of medical image classifiers face a sample-size problem: minority subgroups in held-out test sets have so few samples that the resulting confidence intervals on per-subgroup performance are wider than the bias the audit is meant to detect.

By Mahmoud Ibrahim, Bart Elen, Chang Sun, Gokhan Ertaylan, Michel Dumontier
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

When T2I Synthetic Data Backfires: Amplified Privacy Risks in Real-Synthetic Mix Training

arXiv:2607. 13541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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).

By Na Li, Boyu Kuang, Hongsheng Hu, Liquan Chen, Hyoungshick Kim, Yansong Gao, Anmin Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

A Real-Calibrated Synthetic-First Data Engine

The paper introduces the Real‑Calibrated Synthetic‑First Data Engine, a modular pipeline that integrates controllable diffusion‑based synthetic image generation with multi‑stage curation, filtering, and optional uncertainty‑driven selection and human verification. Designed as a CLI‑based framework, it allows independent configuration of generation, filtering, selection, and validation modules to enhance reproducibility and flexibility in real‑world data workflows. Empirical tests on human pose estimation demonstrate that synthetic data can boost a real‑data baseline when used as low‑cost augmentation, though synthetic‑only training still lags behind real‑only performance, underscoring the importance of data‑centric orchestration in low‑data regimes.

By Yukang Shen, Zhiguo Liu, Yingshu Li, Yan Huang