Task-Conditioned Synthetic Data Generation for Improving Machine Learning Performance in Agricultural Prediction Tasks
On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → LLM synthetic data generation
Abstract (arXiv)
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have been widely used to estimate agricultural variables across diverse contexts. However, because the quantity and quality of training data strongly influence performance of ML algorithms, their use can be constrained by limited or incomplete reference data. Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) offers a practical approach to address this issue by producing artificial but realistic samples that preserve key characteristics of the original data. Building on teacher-student knowledge transfer and in-context learning for tabular data, this study proposes a Task-Conditioned SDG (TCSDG) algorithm that pairs a Bayesian Network generator with a transformer-based tabular foundation model (TabICL). The proposed algorithm was evaluated on two agricultural prediction tasks: crop yield prediction and crop type classification. Six benchmark SDG algorithms were also utilized to compare their performance with that of TCSDG. Across twelve study sites, two training-data fractions, four multiplication ratios, and three predictive ML algorithms, augmenting the original data with TCSDG-generated synthetic data improved ML performance in 89% of the crop type classification experiments and 74% of the crop yield prediction experiments. TCSDG also substantially outperformed benchmark SDG algorithms and was the only method to consistently improve ML performance across both tasks at the aggregate level. The study demonstrates that carefully designed and processed synthetic data can improve ML performance in precision-agriculture applications. TCSDG offers a practical and extensible framework for generating synthetic data that supports downstream ML agricultural prediction. The full implementation of TCSDG is publicly available as open source at https://github.com/HamidEbrahimy/TCSDG.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in LLM synthetic data generation, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 11 of its 67 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.
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11 of 67 references.
References · 11
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- 2023Utility Theory of Synthetic Data Generationcited by 8
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- 2024Comprehensive Exploration of Synthetic Data Generation: A Survey
- 2025Towards High Supervised Learning Utility Training Data Generation: Data Pruning and Column Reordering
- 2026Retrieval-Augmented Multi-scale Framework for County-Level Crop Yield Prediction Across Large Regions
- 2026Improving TabPFN's Synthetic Data Generation by Integrating Causal Structure
- 2025Modern Neural Networks for Small Tabular Datasets: The New Default for Field-Scale Digital Soil Mapping?
- 2026Generating Benchmark Health Data Using a Tabular Diffusion Transformer
- 2025AI in Agriculture: A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Crops, Fisheries and Livestock
- 2023A novel algorithm can generate data to train machine learning models in conditions of extreme scarcity of real world data