# Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08466 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08466/

## Key facts

- Cited by 327 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 62 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 327)

- [DreamSim: Learning New Dimensions of Human Visual Similarity using Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09344/) (2023)
- [Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01850/) (2023)
- [StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00984/) (2023)
- [Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16380/) (2024)
- [A Tale of Tails: Model Collapse as a Change of Scaling Laws](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07043/) (2024)
- [Dataset Diffusion: Diffusion-based Synthetic Dataset Generation for Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14303/) (2023)
- [URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11656/) (2024)
- [Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04567/) (2023)
- [Diversify Your Vision Datasets with Automatic Diffusion-Based Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16289/) (2023)
- [Improving Multimodal Datasets with Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10350/) (2023)
- [Efficient Dataset Distillation via Minimax Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15529/) (2023)
- [Generating images of rare concepts using pre-trained diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14530/) (2023)
- [DiffuseMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14881/) (2024)
- [Dream the Impossible: Outlier Imagination with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13415/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Text-based Person Retrieval: A Large-scale Multi-Attribute and Language Search Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02898/) (2023)
- [Learning Vision from Models Rivals Learning Vision from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17742/) (2023)
- [Generative AI for Medical Imaging: extending the MONAI Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15208/) (2023)
- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [SynthCLIP: Are We Ready for a Fully Synthetic CLIP Training?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01832/) (2024)
- [FreeMask: Synthetic Images with Dense Annotations Make Stronger Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15160/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding the Interplay of Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Internet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06130/) (2023)
- [PathLDM: Text conditioned Latent Diffusion Model for Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00748/) (2023)
- [Training on Thin Air: Improve Image Classification with Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15316/) (2023)
- [Analyzing Bias in Diffusion-based Face Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06402/) (2023)
- [DGInStyle: Domain-Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Image Diffusion Models and Stylized Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03048/) (2023)
- [Beyond Model Collapse: Scaling Up with Synthesized Data Requires Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07515/) (2024)
- [The Journey, Not the Destination: How Data Guides Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06205/) (2023)
- [RF-Diffusion: Radio Signal Generation via Time-Frequency Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09140/) (2024)
- [MetaEarth: A Generative Foundation Model for Global-Scale Remote Sensing Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13570/) (2024)
- [SatSynth: Augmenting Image-Mask Pairs through Diffusion Models for Aerial Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16605/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep generative models are becoming increasingly powerful, now generating diverse high fidelity photo-realistic samples given text prompts. Have they reached the point where models of natural images can be used for generative data augmentation, helping to improve challenging discriminative tasks? We show that large-scale text-to image diffusion models can be fine-tuned to produce class conditional models with SOTA FID (1.76 at 256x256 resolution) and Inception Score (239 at 256x256). The model also yields a new SOTA in Classification Accuracy Scores (64.96 for 256x256 generative samples, improving to 69.24 for 1024x1024 samples). Augmenting the ImageNet training set with samples from the resulting models yields significant improvements in ImageNet classification accuracy over strong ResNet and Vision Transformer baselines.