# Improving the Effectiveness of Deep Generative Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 50 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05931/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07804/) (2021)
- [StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00273/) (2022)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [Is synthetic data from generative models ready for image recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07574/) (2022)
- [DatasetGAN: Efficient Labeled Data Factory with Minimal Human Effort](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06490/) (2021)
- [Domain Randomization and Pyramid Consistency: Simulation-to-Real Generalization without Accessing Target Domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00889/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Uncertainty-aware Evaluation of Auxiliary Anomalies with the Expected Anomaly Posterior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13699/) (2024)
- [OSSA: Unsupervised One-Shot Style Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00900/) (2024)
- [Stylized Synthetic Augmentation further improves Corruption Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15675/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19817/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent deep generative models (DGMs) such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown their impressive ability in generating high-fidelity photorealistic images. Although looking appealing to human eyes, training a model on purely synthetic images for downstream image processing tasks like image classification often results in an undesired performance drop compared to training on real data. Previous works have demonstrated that enhancing a real dataset with synthetic images from DGMs can be beneficial. However, the improvements were subjected to certain circumstances and yet were not comparable to adding the same number of real images. In this work, we propose a new taxonomy to describe factors contributing to this commonly observed phenomenon and investigate it on the popular CIFAR-10 dataset. We hypothesize that the Content Gap accounts for a large portion of the performance drop when using synthetic images from DGM and propose strategies to better utilize them in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets showcase that our method outperforms baselines on downstream classification tasks both in case of training on synthetic only (Synthetic-to-Real) and training on a mix of real and synthetic data (Data Augmentation), particularly in the data-scarce scenario.