# SynthCLIP: Are We Ready for a Fully Synthetic CLIP Training?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13188/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17247/) (2024)
- [No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04125/) (2024)
- [DreamLIP: Language-Image Pre-training with Long Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17007/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09425/) (2025)
- [Latent Guard: a Safety Framework for Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08031/) (2024)
- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [TripletCLIP: Improving Compositional Reasoning of CLIP via Synthetic Vision-Language Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02545/) (2024)
- [FLAIR: VLM with Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03561/) (2024)
- [Is Synthetic Data all We Need? Benchmarking the Robustness of Models Trained with Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20469/) (2024)
- [TIPS: Text-Image Pretraining with Spatial awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16512/) (2024)
- [DataDream: Few-shot Guided Dataset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10910/) (2024)
- [LoTLIP: Improving Language-Image Pre-training for Long Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05249/) (2024)
- [A Practitioner's Guide to Continual Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14471/) (2024)
- [MobileCLIP2: Improving Multi-Modal Reinforced Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20691/) (2025)
- [The Unmet Promise of Synthetic Training Images: Using Retrieved Real Images Performs Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05184/) (2024)
- [SELMA: Learning and Merging Skill-Specific Text-to-Image Experts with Auto-Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06952/) (2024)
- [Detecting Human Artifacts from Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13842/) (2024)
- [SteerDiff: Steering towards Safe Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02710/) (2024)
- [Personalized Representation from Personalized Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16156/) (2024)
- [PromptMap: An Alternative Interaction Style for AI-Based Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09436/) (2025)
- [On Pretraining Data Diversity for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13808/) (2024)
- [Graph-Based Captioning: Enhancing Visual Descriptions by Interconnecting Region Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06723/) (2024)
- [Can Medical Vision-Language Pre-training Succeed with Purely Synthetic Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13523/) (2024)
- [Seeing What Matters: Empowering CLIP with Patch Generation-to-Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17080/) (2025)
- [FIX-CLIP: Dual-Branch Hierarchical Contrastive Learning via Synthetic Captions for Better Understanding of Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10095/) (2025)
- [When Pretty Isn't Useful: Investigating Why Modern Text-to-Image Models Fail as Reliable Training Data Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19946/) (2026)
- [Mind the Gap Between Synthetic and Real: Utilizing Transfer Learning to Probe the Boundaries of Stable Diffusion Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03243/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Distillation for Image Encoders: How to Make Effective Use of Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16637/) (2024)
- [Perturb and Recover: Fine-tuning for Effective Backdoor Removal from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00727/) (2024)
- [Does Feasibility Matter? Understanding the Impact of Feasibility on Synthetic Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10551/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present SynthCLIP, a CLIP model trained on entirely synthetic text-image pairs. Leveraging recent text-to-image (TTI) networks and large language models (LLM), we generate synthetic datasets of images and corresponding captions at scale, with no human intervention. In this work, we provide an analysis on CLIP models trained on synthetic data. We provide insights on the data generation strategy, number of samples required, scaling trends, and resulting properties. We also introduce SynthCI-30M, a purely synthetic dataset comprising 30 million captioned images. Our code, trained models, and data, are released as open source at https://github.com/hammoudhasan/SynthCLIP