# A New Benchmark: On the Utility of Synthetic Data with Blender for Bare Supervised Learning and Downstream Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09165 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09165/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [GPT4Motion: Scripting Physical Motions in Text-to-Video Generation via Blender-Oriented GPT Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12631/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Domain Adaptation through Prompt Gradient Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09353/) (2024)
- [DREAM: Improving Video-Text Retrieval Through Relevance-Based Augmentation Using Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05083/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Data for Aerial-view Human Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15203/) (2024)
- [How Well Do Vision--Language Models Understand Cities? A Comparative Study on Spatial Reasoning from Street-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21565/) (2025)
- [Towards Domain Adaptive Neural Contextual Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09564/) (2024)
- [PAS: Estimating the target accuracy before domain adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09863/) (2026)
- [Transparent Fragments Contour Estimation via Visual-Tactile Fusion for Autonomous Reassembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20290/) (2026)
- [Grad-CAM for Vision Transformers: A Systematic Taxonomy and Audit of Methodological Ambiguity in Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05258/) (2026)
- [Limitations of Synthetic Data Generation in Specialized Data-Scarce Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13729/) (2026)
- [IDeaL: Data-Free Multi-Teacher Distillation via Improved Dead Leaves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24759/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning in computer vision has achieved great success with the price of large-scale labeled training data. However, exhaustive data annotation is impracticable for each task of all domains of interest, due to high labor costs and unguaranteed labeling accuracy. Besides, the uncontrollable data collection process produces non-IID training and test data, where undesired duplication may exist. All these nuisances may hinder the verification of typical theories and exposure to new findings. To circumvent them, an alternative is to generate synthetic data via 3D rendering with domain randomization. We in this work push forward along this line by doing profound and extensive research on bare supervised learning and downstream domain adaptation. Specifically, under the well-controlled, IID data setting enabled by 3D rendering, we systematically verify the typical, important learning insights, e.g., shortcut learning, and discover the new laws of various data regimes and network architectures in generalization. We further investigate the effect of image formation factors on generalization, e.g., object scale, material texture, illumination, camera viewpoint, and background in a 3D scene. Moreover, we use the simulation-to-reality adaptation as a downstream task for comparing the transferability between synthetic and real data when used for pre-training, which demonstrates that synthetic data pre-training is also promising to improve real test results. Lastly, to promote future research, we develop a new large-scale synthetic-to-real benchmark for image classification, termed S2RDA, which provides more significant challenges for transfer from simulation to reality. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/huitangtang/On_the_Utility_of_Synthetic_Data.