Declarative Outcome-Conformant Synthesis: Exact, Closed-Form Specification Satisfaction and a Conformance Benchmark
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Abstract (arXiv)
We study a capability the dominant paradigm in synthetic tabular data does not provide: exact satisfaction of a declared analytical outcome with no source data. Imitation methods (copulas, GANs, diffusion) learn a real distribution and sample from it, and are judged on fidelity to real data. A large, practical class of needs is different: generating data with no source data ("cold start") that reproduces a declared outcome (a revenue curve, a churn rate, a group share) across a relational schema. Off-the-shelf imitation tools offer no interface for such targets, and no sampler can hit an exact aggregate, because sampling has variance. On a real public dataset, off-the-shelf learned synthesizers trained on that very data miss the declared monthly aggregate by 74 to 86 percent; a per-period steelman cuts the miss to about 19 percent and still cannot reach 0; a closed-form generator reaches exactly 0. We name this task outcome-conformant synthesis, argue its evaluation axis is conformance rather than fidelity, and show the two axes are orthogonal. We contribute: (1) a formal account showing a widely-used family of exact-aggregate generators is exactly conditional-sum sampling of a Gamma population (via Lukacs' characterization), with closed-form exactness, a closed-form marginal CV, and scale-invariance; a controlled experiment maps the boundary, enforcing the exact aggregate costs at most 0.006 in 1-Wasserstein distance to an arbitrary external marginal, the rest being shape-family mismatch; (2) SpecBench, to our knowledge the first benchmark to measure conformance to analytical outcomes for cold-start relational synthesis; and (3) a closed-form, deterministic reference system. Exact aggregation alone is trivial; the contribution is conformance jointly with closed-form marginals, integrity, determinism, and zero source data. We concede fidelity to imitation where real data exists.
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References · 13
- 2019Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GANcited by 695
- 2022TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Modelscited by 373
- 2017Real-valued (Medical) Time Series Generation with Recurrent Conditional GANscited by 329
- 2022TabSynDex: A Universal Metric for Robust Evaluation of Synthetic Tabular Datacited by 27
- 2024SynthEval: A Framework for Detailed Utility and Privacy Evaluation of Tabular Synthetic Datacited by 27
- 2025The DCR Delusion: Measuring the Privacy Risk of Synthetic Datacited by 11
- 2025LLM-TabLogic: Preserving Inter-Column Logical Relationships in Synthetic Tabular Data via Prompt-Guided Latent Diffusioncited by 8
- 2025Benchmarking Synthetic Tabular Data: A Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Frameworkcited by 6
- 2025RelDiff: Relational Data Generative Modeling with Graph-Based Diffusion Modelscited by 3
- 2014Sequentially Constrained Monte Carlocited by 2
- 2023IRG: Modular Synthetic Relational Database Generation with Complex Relational Schemascited by 2
- 2024Hierarchical Conditional Tabular GAN for Multi-Tabular Synthetic Data Generationcited by 1
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