# Is Synthetic Image Useful for Transfer Learning? An Investigation into Data Generation, Volume, and Utilization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19866 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19866/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07035/) (2017)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Layout Agnostic Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes through Textual Descriptions Of Sensor Triggers (TDOST)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12368/) (2024)
- [A Simple Background Augmentation Method for Object Detection with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00350/) (2024)
- [Can Synthetic Audio From Generative Foundation Models Assist Audio Recognition and Speech Modeling?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08800/) (2024)
- [The Impact of Synthetic Data on Object Detection Model Performance: A Comparative Analysis with Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12208/) (2025)
- [Attributed Synthetic Data Generation for Zero-shot Domain-specific Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04510/) (2025)
- [Post-Generation Curation of Synthetic Images via Homogeneous-Heterogeneous Splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02637/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic image data generation represents a promising avenue for training deep learning models, particularly in the realm of transfer learning, where obtaining real images within a specific domain can be prohibitively expensive due to privacy and intellectual property considerations. This work delves into the generation and utilization of synthetic images derived from text-to-image generative models in facilitating transfer learning paradigms. Despite the high visual fidelity of the generated images, we observe that their naive incorporation into existing real-image datasets does not consistently enhance model performance due to the inherent distribution gap between synthetic and real images. To address this issue, we introduce a novel two-stage framework called bridged transfer, which initially employs synthetic images for fine-tuning a pre-trained model to improve its transferability and subsequently uses real data for rapid adaptation. Alongside, We propose dataset style inversion strategy to improve the stylistic alignment between synthetic and real images. Our proposed methods are evaluated across 10 different datasets and 5 distinct models, demonstrating consistent improvements, with up to 30% accuracy increase on classification tasks. Intriguingly, we note that the enhancements were not yet saturated, indicating that the benefits may further increase with an expanded volume of synthetic data.