# Synthetica: Large Scale Synthetic Data for Robot Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21153 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21153/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00177/) (2018)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08466/) (2023)
- [Is synthetic data from generative models ready for image recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07574/) (2022)
- [Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06230/) (2022)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07944/) (2023)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [MegaPose: 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Render & Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06870/) (2022)
- [StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00984/) (2023)
- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13702/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04567/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Reconstruction by Generation: 3D Multi-Object Scene Reconstruction from Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27106/) (2026)
- [ViserDex: Visual Sim-to-Real for Robust Dexterous In-hand Reorientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11138/) (2026)
- [Iterative Compositional Data Generation for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10891/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-based object detectors are a crucial basis for robotics applications as they provide valuable information about object localisation in the environment. These need to ensure high reliability in different lighting conditions, occlusions, and visual artifacts, all while running in real-time. Collecting and annotating real-world data for these networks is prohibitively time consuming and costly, especially for custom assets, such as industrial objects, making it untenable for generalization to in-the-wild scenarios. To this end, we present Synthetica, a method for large-scale synthetic data generation for training robust state estimators. This paper focuses on the task of object detection, an important problem which can serve as the front-end for most state estimation problems, such as pose estimation. Leveraging data from a photorealistic ray-tracing renderer, we scale up data generation, generating 2.7 million images, to train highly accurate real-time detection transformers. We present a collection of rendering randomization and training-time data augmentation techniques conducive to robust sim-to-real performance for vision tasks. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the task of object detection while having detectors that run at 50-100Hz which is 9 times faster than the prior SOTA. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our training methodology for robotics applications by showcasing a pipeline for use in the real world with custom objects for which there do not exist prior datasets. Our work highlights the importance of scaling synthetic data generation for robust sim-to-real transfer while achieving the fastest real-time inference speeds. Videos and supplementary information can be found at this URL: https://sites.google.com/view/synthetica-vision.