# Your Image Generator Is Your New Private Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04582 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04582/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)
- LLM safety and security / [Membership inference attacks](https://mlsanity.com/safety/membership-inference-attacks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03570/) (2021)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02943/) (2016)
- [Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11708/) (2024)
- [fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04688/) (2020)
- [Fake it till you make it: Learning transferable representations from synthetic ImageNet clones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08420/) (2022)
- [Classification Accuracy Score for Conditional Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10887/) (2019)
- [GALIP: Generative Adversarial CLIPs for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12959/) (2023)
- [Diversity is Definitely Needed: Improving Model-Agnostic Zero-shot Classification via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03298/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Guided Generative Image Augmentation Method with Diffusion Models for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02070/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PolyGen: Fully Synthetic Vision-Language Training via Multi-Generator Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01370/) (2026)
- [A Filtered Mixture-of-Generators for Fully Synthetic Survival Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00127/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools to synthetically produce training data, offering potential solutions to data scarcity and reducing labelling costs for downstream supervised deep learning applications. However, effectively leveraging text-conditioned image generation for building classifier training sets requires addressing key issues: constructing informative textual prompts, adapting generative models to specific domains, and ensuring robust performance. This paper proposes the Text-Conditioned Knowledge Recycling (TCKR) pipeline to tackle these challenges. TCKR combines dynamic image captioning, parameter-efficient diffusion model fine-tuning, and Generative Knowledge Distillation techniques to create synthetic datasets tailored for image classification. The pipeline is rigorously evaluated on ten diverse image classification benchmarks. The results demonstrate that models trained solely on TCKR-generated data achieve classification accuracies on par with (and in several cases exceeding) models trained on real images. Furthermore, the evaluation reveals that these synthetic-data-trained models exhibit substantially enhanced privacy characteristics: their vulnerability to Membership Inference Attacks is significantly reduced, with the membership inference AUC lowered by 5.49 points on average compared to using real training data, demonstrating a substantial improvement in the performance-privacy trade-off. These findings indicate that high-fidelity synthetic data can effectively replace real data for training classifiers, yielding strong performance whilst simultaneously providing improved privacy protection as a valuable emergent property. The code and trained models are available in the accompanying open-source repository.
