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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Restoring Without Forgetting: Continual Learning Across Image Degradations

The paper introduces Restoring without Forgetting (RwF), a continual learning framework for image restoration that handles multiple degradations sequentially without accessing prior data. RwF trains a lightweight adapter for each new degradation, uses an unsupervised routing mechanism to select the correct restoration path, and achieves significant PSNR gains over fine‑tuning on five benchmark degradation domains. The method also demonstrates strong transfer performance on eleven real‑degradation datasets with high routing accuracy.

By Alif Ashrafee, Bartosz Krawczyk