# Kubric: A scalable dataset generator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/

## Key facts

- Cited by 381 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 122 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 381)

- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03751/) (2025)
- [Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13786/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [MegaSaM: Accurate, Fast, and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04463/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap to Real-World Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14860/) (2022)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04319/) (2024)
- [Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01943/) (2023)
- [ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10934/) (2025)
- [SAVi++: Towards End-to-End Object-Centric Learning from Real-World Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07764/) (2022)
- [CAT4D: Create Anything in 4D with Multi-View Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18613/) (2024)
- [Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09310/) (2023)
- [Simple Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning for Complex and Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14065/) (2022)
- [D2NeRF: Self-Supervised Decoupling of Dynamic and Static Objects from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15838/) (2022)
- [CoTracker3: Simpler and Better Point Tracking by Pseudo-Labelling Real Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11831/) (2024)
- [TrajectoryCrafter: Redirecting Camera Trajectory for Monocular Videos via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05638/) (2025)
- [BootsTAP: Bootstrapped Training for Tracking-Any-Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00847/) (2024)
- [Generative Camera Dolly: Extreme Monocular Dynamic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14868/) (2024)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01923/) (2023)
- [RobustNeRF: Ignoring Distractors with Robust Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00833/) (2023)
- [Quality Not Quantity: On the Interaction between Dataset Design and Robustness of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05516/) (2022)
- [3D-GPT: Procedural 3D Modeling with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12945/) (2023)
- [Object Scene Representation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06922/) (2022)
- [Object-Centric Slot Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10834/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.