# Attributed Synthetic Data Generation for Zero-shot Domain-specific Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04510 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04510/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 29 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data](https://mlsanity.com/synth/self-improving-mllms-and-synthetic-data/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [Is synthetic data from generative models ready for image recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07574/) (2022)
- [What does a platypus look like? Generating customized prompts for zero-shot image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03320/) (2022)
- [Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15895/) (2023)
- [Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision : Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01566/) (2017)
- [Learning Semantic Segmentation from Synthetic Data: A Geometrically Guided Input-Output Adaptation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05040/) (2018)
- [Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04567/) (2023)
- [NeRF-Supervision: Learning Dense Object Descriptors from Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01913/) (2022)
- [Diversity is Definitely Needed: Improving Model-Agnostic Zero-shot Classification via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03298/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Learning via Semantic Similarity Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.04767/) (2015)
- [Comprehensive Exploration of Synthetic Data Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02524/) (2024)
- [Diversify, Don't Fine-Tune: Scaling Up Visual Recognition Training with Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02253/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Sample Selection for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02846/) (2023)
- [Is Synthetic Image Useful for Transfer Learning? An Investigation into Data Generation, Volume, and Utilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19866/) (2024)
- [On the Diversity of Realistic Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07329/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot domain-specific image classification is challenging in classifying real images without ground-truth in-domain training examples. Recent research involved knowledge from texts with a text-to-image model to generate in-domain training images in zero-shot scenarios. However, existing methods heavily rely on simple prompt strategies, limiting the diversity of synthetic training images, thus leading to inferior performance compared to real images. In this paper, we propose AttrSyn, which leverages large language models to generate attributed prompts. These prompts allow for the generation of more diverse attributed synthetic images. Experiments for zero-shot domain-specific image classification on two fine-grained datasets show that training with synthetic images generated by AttrSyn significantly outperforms CLIP's zero-shot classification under most situations and consistently surpasses simple prompt strategies.
