Synthetic Homes: A Multimodal Generative AI Pipeline for Residential Building Data Generation under Data Scarcity

Abstract: Computational models have emerged as powerful tools for multi-scale energy modeling research at the building and urban scale, supporting data-driven analysis across building and urban energy systems. However, these models require large amounts of building parameter data that is often inaccessible, expensive to collect, or subject to privacy constraints. We introduce a modular, multimodal generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework that integrates image, tabular, and simulation-based components and produces synthetic residential building datasets from publicly available county records and images, and present an end-to-end pipeline instantiating this framework. To reduce typical Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, we evaluate our model's components using occlusion-based visual focus analysis. Our analysis demonstrates that our selected vision-language model achieves greater visual focus than a GPT-based alternative for building image processing. We also assess realism of our results against a national reference dataset, finding that our synthetic data overlaps more than 95% for three of the four selected variables. This work reduces dependence on costly or restricted data sources, lowering barriers to building-scale energy research and Machine Learning (ML)-driven urban energy modeling, and therefore enabling scalable downstream tasks such as energy modeling, retrofit analysis, and urban-scale simulation under data scarcity.

Jackson Eshbaugh
Chetan Tiwari
Jorge Silveyra


"A 6 or a 9?": Ensemble Learning Through the Multiplicity of Performant Models and Explanations

Abstract: Creating models from past observations and ensuring their effectiveness on new data is the essence of machine learning. However, selecting models that generalize well remains a challenging task. Related to this topic, the Rashomon Effect refers to cases where multiple models perform similarly well for a given learning problem. This often occurs in real-world scenarios, like the manufacturing process or medical diagnosis, where diverse patterns in data lead to multiple high-performing solutions. We propose the Rashomon Ensemble, a method that strategically selects models from these diverse high-performing solutions to improve generalization. By grouping models based on both their performance and explanations, we construct ensembles that maximize diversity while maintaining predictive accuracy. This selection ensures that each model covers a distinct region of the solution space, making the ensemble more robust to distribution shifts and variations in unseen data. We validate our approach on both open and proprietary collaborative real-world datasets, demonstrating up to 0.20+ AUROC improvements in scenarios where the Rashomon ratio is large. Additionally, we demonstrate tangible benefits for businesses in various real-world applications, highlighting the robustness, practicality, and effectiveness of our approach.

ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data


From Scarcity to Efficiency: Investigating the Effects of Data Augmentation on African Machine Translation

Abstract: The linguistic diversity across the African continent presents different challenges and opportunities for machine translation. This study explores the effects of data augmentation techniques in improving translation systems in low-resource African languages. We focus on two data augmentation techniques: sentence concatenation with back translation and switch-out, applying them across six African languages. Our experiments show significant improvements in machine translation performance, with a minimum increase of 25\% in BLEU score across all six languages. We provide a comprehensive analysis and highlight the potential of these techniques to improve machine translation systems for low-resource languages, contributing to the development of more robust translation systems for under-resourced languages.

Mardiyyah Oduwole
Oluwatosin Olajide
Jamiu Suleiman
Faith Hunja
Busayo Awobade
Fatimo Adebanjo
Comfort Akanni
Chinonyelum Igwe
Peace Ododo
Promise Omoigui
Abraham Owodunni
Steven Kolawole


Multi-Label Transfer Learning in Non-Stationary Data Streams

Abstract: Label concepts in multi-label data streams often experience drift in non-stationary environments, either independently or in relation to other labels. Transferring knowledge between related labels can accelerate adaptation, yet research on multi-label transfer learning for data streams remains limited. To address this, we propose two novel transfer learning methods: BR-MARLENE leverages knowledge from different labels in both source and target streams for multi-label classification; BRPW-MARLENE builds on this by explicitly modelling and transferring pairwise label dependencies to enhance learning performance. Comprehensive experiments show that both methods outperform state-of-the-art multi-label stream approaches in non-stationary environments, demonstrating the effectiveness of inter-label knowledge transfer for improved predictive performance.

Honghui Du
Leandro Minku
Aonghus Lawlor
Huiyu Zhou


Data-Augmented Quantization-Aware Knowledge Distillation

Abstract: Quantization-aware training (QAT) and Knowledge Distillation (KD) are combined to achieve competitive performance in creating low-bit deep learning models. Existing KD and QAT works focus on improving the accuracy of quantized models from the network output perspective by designing better KD loss functions or optimizing QAT's forward and backward propagation. However, limited attention has been given to understanding the impact of input transformations, such as data augmentation (DA). The relationship between quantization-aware KD and DA remains unexplored. In this paper, we address the question: how to select a good DA in quantization-aware KD, especially for the models with low precisions? We propose a novel metric which evaluates DAs according to their capacity to maximize the Contextual Mutual Information--the information not directly related to an image's label--while also ensuring the predictions for each class are close to the ground truth labels on average. The proposed method automatically ranks and selects DAs, requiring minimal training overhead, and it is compatible with any KD or QAT algorithm. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that selecting DA strategies using our metric significantly improves state-of-the-art QAT and KD works across various model architectures and datasets.


Data Cartography for Detecting Memorization Hotspots and Guiding Data Interventions in Generative Models

Abstract: Modern generative models risk overfitting and unintentionally memorizing rare training examples, which can be extracted by adversaries or inflate benchmark performance. We propose Generative Data Cartography (GenDataCarto), a data-centric framework that assigns each pretraining sample a difficulty score (early-epoch loss) and a memorization score (frequency of ``forget events''), then partitions examples into four quadrants to guide targeted pruning and up-/down-weighting. We prove that our memorization score lower-bounds classical influence under smoothness assumptions and that down-weighting high-memorization hotspots provably decreases the generalization gap via uniform stability bounds. Empirically, GenDataCarto reduces synthetic canary extraction success by over 40\% at just 10\% data pruning, while increasing validation perplexity by less than 0.5\%. These results demonstrate that principled data interventions can dramatically mitigate leakage with minimal cost to generative performance.


Generative Models for Synthetic Data: Transforming Data Mining in the GenAI Era

Abstract: Generative models such as Large Language Models, Diffusion Models, and generative adversarial networks have recently revolutionized the creation of synthetic data, offering scalable solutions to data scarcity, privacy, and annotation challenges in data mining. This tutorial introduces the foundations and latest advances in synthetic data generation, covers key methodologies and practical frameworks, and discusses evaluation strategies and applications. Attendees will gain actionable insights into leveraging generative synthetic data to enhance data mining research and practice. More information can be found on our website: https://syndata4dm.github.io/.

Dawei Li
Yue Huang
Ming Li
Tianyi Zhou
Xiangliang Zhang
Huan Liu

International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management


Database Entity Recognition with Data Augmentation and Deep Learning

Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of Database Entity Recognition (DB-ER) in Natural Language Queries (NLQ). We present several key contributions to advance this field: (1) a human-annotated benchmark for DB-ER task, derived from popular text-to-sql benchmarks, (2) a novel data augmentation procedure that leverages automatic annotation of NLQs based on the corresponding SQL queries which are available in popular text-to-SQL benchmarks, (3) a specialized language model based entity recognition model using T5 as a backbone and two down-stream DB-ER tasks: sequence tagging and token classification for fine-tuning of backend and performing DB-ER respectively. We compared our DB-ER tagger with two state-of-the-art NER taggers, and observed better performance in both precision and recall for our model. The ablation evaluation shows that data augmentation boosts precision and recall by over 10%, while fine-tuning of the T5 backbone boosts these metrics by 5-10%.

Zikun Fu
Chen Yang
Kourosh Davoudi
Ken Q. Pu

IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration


Metrics, KPIs, and Taxonomy for Data Valuation and Monetisation -- A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract: Data valuation and data monetisation are complex subjects but essential to most organisations today. Unfortunately, they still lack standard procedures and frameworks for organisations to follow. In this survey, we introduce the reader to the concepts by providing the definitions and the background required to better understand data, monetisation strategies, and finally metrics and KPIs used in these strategies. We have conducted a systematic literature review on metrics and KPIs used in data valuation and monetisation, in every aspect of an organisation's business, and by a variety of stakeholders. We provide an expansive list of such metrics and KPIs with 162 references. We then categorise all the metrics and KPIs found into a large taxonomy, following the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach with further subclustering to cover every aspect of an organisation's business. This taxonomy will help every level of data management understand the complex landscape of the domain. We also discuss the difficulty in creating a standard framework for data valuation and data monetisation and the major challenges the domain is currently facing.

Eduardo Vyhmeister
Bastien Pietropaoli
Alejando Martinez Molina
Montserrat Gonzalez-Ferreiro
Gabriel Gonzalez-Castane
Jordi Arjona Aroca
Andrea Visentin


CultranAI at PalmX 2025: Data Augmentation for Cultural Knowledge Representation

Abstract: In this paper, we report our participation to the PalmX cultural evaluation shared task. Our system, CultranAI, focused on data augmentation and LoRA fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) for Arabic cultural knowledge representation. We benchmarked several LLMs to identify the best-performing model for the task. In addition to utilizing the PalmX dataset, we augmented it by incorporating the Palm dataset and curated a new dataset of over 22K culturally grounded multiple-choice questions (MCQs). Our experiments showed that the Fanar-1-9B-Instruct model achieved the highest performance. We fine-tuned this model on the combined augmented dataset of 22K+ MCQs. On the blind test set, our submitted system ranked 5th with an accuracy of 70.50%, while on the PalmX development set, it achieved an accuracy of 84.1%.

Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti
Youssef Ahmed
Md Arid Hasan
Firoj Alam


HandCraft: Dynamic Sign Generation for Synthetic Data Augmentation

Abstract: Sign Language Recognition (SLR) models face significant performance limitations due to insufficient training data availability. In this article, we address the challenge of limited data in SLR by introducing a novel and lightweight sign generation model based on CMLPe. This model, coupled with a synthetic data pretraining approach, consistently improves recognition accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art results for the LSFB and DiSPLaY datasets using our Mamba-SL and Transformer-SL classifiers. Our findings reveal that synthetic data pretraining outperforms traditional augmentation methods in some cases and yields complementary benefits when implemented alongside them. Our approach democratizes sign generation and synthetic data pretraining for SLR by providing computationally efficient methods that achieve significant performance improvements across diverse datasets.

Gaston Gustavo Rios
Pedro Dal Bianco
Franco Ronchetti
Facundo Quiroga
Oscar Stanchi
Santiago Ponte Ahón
Waldo Hasperué


Synthetic Adaptive Guided Embeddings (SAGE): A Novel Knowledge Distillation Method

Abstract: Model distillation enables the transfer of knowledge from large-scale models to compact student models, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments. However, conventional distillation approaches often suffer from computational overhead and limited generalization. We propose a novel adaptive distillation framework that dynamically augments training data in regions of high student model loss. Using UMAP-based dimensionality reduction and nearest neighbor sampling, our method identifies underperforming regions in the embedding space and generates targeted synthetic examples to guide student learning. To further improve efficiency, we introduce a lightweight teacher-student interface that bypasses the teacher's input layer, enabling direct distillation on vectorized representations. Experiments across standard NLP benchmarks demonstrate that our 66M-parameter student model consistently matches or surpasses established baselines, achieving 91.2% on QNLI and 92.3% on SST-2, while training with fewer epochs. These results highlight the promise of loss-aware data augmentation and vectorized distillation for efficient and effective model compression.

Suleyman Olcay Polat
Poli A. Nemkova
Mark V. Albert


TOM: An Open-Source Tongue Segmentation Method with Multi-Teacher Distillation and Task-Specific Data Augmentation

Abstract: Tongue imaging serves as a valuable diagnostic tool, particularly in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The quality of tongue surface segmentation significantly affects the accuracy of tongue image classification and subsequent diagnosis in intelligent tongue diagnosis systems. However, existing research on tongue image segmentation faces notable limitations, and there is a lack of robust and user-friendly segmentation tools. This paper proposes a tongue image segmentation model (TOM) based on multi-teacher knowledge distillation. By incorporating a novel diffusion-based data augmentation method, we enhanced the generalization ability of the segmentation model while reducing its parameter size. Notably, after reducing the parameter count by 96.6% compared to the teacher models, the student model still achieves an impressive segmentation performance of 95.22% mIoU. Furthermore, we packaged and deployed the trained model as both an online and offline segmentation tool (available at https://itongue.cn/), allowing TCM practitioners and researchers to use it without any programming experience. We also present a case study on TCM constitution classification using segmented tongue patches. Experimental results demonstrate that training with tongue patches yields higher classification performance and better interpretability than original tongue images. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source and freely available tongue image segmentation tool.

Jiacheng Xie
Ziyang Zhang
Biplab Poudel
Congyu Guo
Yang Yu
Guanghui An
Xiaoting Tang
Lening Zhao
Chunhui Xu
Dong Xu


Effect of Data Augmentation on Conformal Prediction for Diabetic Retinopathy

Abstract: The clinical deployment of deep learning models for high-stakes tasks such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading requires demonstrable reliability. While models achieve high accuracy, their clinical utility is limited by a lack of robust uncertainty quantification. Conformal prediction (CP) offers a distribution-free framework to generate prediction sets with statistical guarantees of coverage. However, the interaction between standard training practices like data augmentation and the validity of these guarantees is not well understood. In this study, we systematically investigate how different data augmentation strategies affect the performance of conformal predictors for DR grading. Using the DDR dataset, we evaluate two backbone architectures -- ResNet-50 and a Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Transformer (CoaT) -- trained under five augmentation regimes: no augmentation, standard geometric transforms, CLAHE, Mixup, and CutMix. We analyze the downstream effects on conformal metrics, including empirical coverage, average prediction set size, and correct efficiency. Our results demonstrate that sample-mixing strategies like Mixup and CutMix not only improve predictive accuracy but also yield more reliable and efficient uncertainty estimates. Conversely, methods like CLAHE can negatively impact model certainty. These findings highlight the need to co-design augmentation strategies with downstream uncertainty quantification in mind to build genuinely trustworthy AI systems for medical imaging.

Rizwan Ahamed
Annahita Amireskandari
Joel Palko
Carol Laxson
Binod Bhattarai
Prashnna Gyawali


Leveraging the Christoffel Function for Outlier Detection in Data Streams

Abstract: Outlier detection holds significant importance in the realm of data mining, particularly with the growing pervasiveness of data acquisition methods. The ability to identify outliers in data streams is essential for maintaining data quality and detecting faults. However, dealing with data streams presents challenges due to the non-stationary nature of distributions and the ever-increasing data volume. While numerous methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge, a common drawback is the lack of straightforward parameterization in many of them. This article introduces two novel methods: DyCF and DyCG. DyCF leverages the Christoffel function from the theory of approximation and orthogonal polynomials. Conversely, DyCG capitalizes on the growth properties of the Christoffel function, eliminating the need for tuning parameters. Both approaches are firmly rooted in a well-defined algebraic framework, meeting crucial demands for data stream processing, with a specific focus on addressing low-dimensional aspects and maintaining data history without memory cost. A comprehensive comparison between DyCF, DyCG, and state-of-the-art methods is presented, using both synthetic and real industrial data streams. The results show that DyCF outperforms fine-tuning methods, offering superior performance in terms of execution time and memory usage. DyCG performs less well, but has the considerable advantage of requiring no tuning at all.

Kévin Ducharlet
Louise Travé-Massuyès
Jean-Bernard Lasserre
Marie-Véronique Le Lann
Youssef Miloudi

International Journal of Data Science and Analysis


Difficulty-Based Preference Data Selection by DPO Implicit Reward Gap

Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is a critical challenge in AI research. While methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) are widely used, they often rely on large, costly preference datasets. The current work lacks methods for high-quality data selection specifically for preference data. In this work, we introduce a novel difficulty-based data selection strategy for preference datasets, grounded in the DPO implicit reward mechanism. By selecting preference data examples with smaller DPO implicit reward gaps, which are indicative of more challenging cases, we improve data efficiency and model alignment. Our approach consistently outperforms five strong baselines across multiple datasets and alignment tasks, achieving superior performance with only 10\% of the original data. This principled, efficient selection method offers a promising solution for scaling LLM alignment with limited resources.


Managing Data for Scalable and Interactive Event Sequence Visualization

Abstract: Parallel event sequences, such as those collected in program execution traces and automated manufacturing pipelines, are typically visualized as interactive parallel timelines. As the dataset size grows, these charts frequently experience lag during common interactions such as zooming, panning, and filtering. Summarization approaches can improve interaction performance, but at the cost of accuracy in representation. To address this challenge, we introduce ESeMan (Event Sequence Manager), an event sequence management system designed to support interactive rendering of timeline visualizations with tunable accuracy. ESeMan employs hierarchical data structures and intelligent caching to provide visualizations with only the data necessary to generate accurate summarizations with significantly reduced data fetch time. We evaluate ESeMan's query times against summed area tables, M4 aggregation, and statistical sub-sampling on a variety of program execution traces. Our results demonstrate ESeMan provides better performance, achieving sub-100ms fetch times while maintaining visualization accuracy at the pixel level. We further present our benchmarking harness, enabling future performance evaluations for event sequence visualization.

IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization


Decoupling Data and Tooling in Interactive Visualization

Abstract: Interactive data visualization is a major part of modern exploratory data analysis, with web-based technologies enabling a rich ecosystem of both specialized and general tools. However, current visualization tools often lack support for transformation or wrangling of data and are forced to re-implement their own solutions to load and ingest data. This redundancy creates substantial development overhead for tool creators, steeper learning curves for users who must master different data handling interfaces across tools and a degraded user experience as data handling is usually seen as an after-thought. We propose a modular approach that separates data wrangling and loading capabilities from visualization components. This architecture allows visualization tools to concentrate on their core strengths while providing the opportunity to develop a unified, powerful interface for data handling. An additional benefit of this approach is that it allows for multiple tools to exist and be used side by side. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by building an early prototype using web technologies to encapsulate visualization tools and manage data flow between them. We discuss future research directions, including downstream integrations with other tooling, such as IDEs, literate programming notebooks and applications, as well as incorporation of new technologies for efficient data transformations. We seek input from the community to better understand the requirements towards this approach.


CoT-Self-Instruct: Building high-quality synthetic prompts for reasoning and non-reasoning tasks

Abstract: We propose CoT-Self-Instruct, a synthetic data generation method that instructs LLMs to first reason and plan via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based on given seed tasks, and then generate a new synthetic example of similar quality and complexity. This is followed by a filtering step to select high-quality data using automatic metrics, which are then used for LLM training. In verifiable reasoning, our synthetic data significantly outperforms existing training datasets, such as s1k and OpenMathReasoning, when evaluated on MATH500, AMC23, AIME24, and GPQA-Diamond. For non-verifiable instruction-following tasks, our method surpasses the performance of both human and standard Self-Instruct training data on the AlpacaEval 2.0 and Arena-Hard benchmarks.

Ping Yu
Jack Lanchantin
Tianlu Wang
Weizhe Yuan
Olga Golovneva
Ilia Kulikov
Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Jason Weston
Jing Xu


How Sovereign Is Sovereign Compute? A Review of 775 Non-U.S. Data Centers

Abstract: Previous literature has proposed that the companies operating data centers enforce government regulations on AI companies. Using a new dataset of 775 non-U.S. data center projects, this paper estimates how often data centers could be subject to foreign legal authorities due to the nationality of the data center operators. We find that U.S. companies operate 48% of all non-U.S. data center projects in our dataset when weighted by investment value - a proxy for compute capacity. This is an approximation based on public data and should be interpreted as an initial estimate. For the United States, our findings suggest that data center operators offer a lever for internationally governing AI that complements traditional export controls, since operators can be used to regulate computing resources already deployed in non-U.S. data centers. For other countries, our results show that building data centers locally does not guarantee digital sovereignty if those facilities are run by foreign entities. To support future research, we release our dataset, which documents over 20 variables relating to each data center, including the year it was announced, the investment value, and its operator's national affiliation. The dataset also includes over 1,000 quotes describing these data centers' strategic motivations, operational challenges, and engagement with U.S. and Chinese entities.

Aris Richardson
Haley Yi
Michelle Nie
Simon Wisdom
Casey Price
Ruben Weijers
Steven Veld
Mauricio Baker


Knowledge Augmentation via Synthetic Data: A Framework for Real-World ECG Image Classification

Abstract: In real-world clinical practice, electrocardiograms (ECGs) are often captured and shared as photographs. However, publicly available ECG data, and thus most related research, relies on digital signals. This has led to a disconnect in which computer assisted interpretation of ECG cannot easily be applied to ECG images. The emergence of high-fidelity synthetic data generators has introduced practical alternatives by producing realistic, photo-like, ECG images derived from the digital signal that could help narrow this divide. To address this, we propose a novel knowledge augmentation framework that uses synthetic data generated from multiple sources to provide generalisable and accurate interpretation of ECG photographs. Our framework features two key contributions. First, we introduce a robust pre-processing pipeline designed to remove background artifacts and reduces visual differences between images. Second, we implement a two-stage training strategy: a Morphology Learning Stage, where the model captures broad morphological features from visually different, scan-like synthetic data, followed by a Task-Specific Adaptation Stage, where the model is fine-tuned on the photo-like target data. We tested the model on the British Heart Foundation Challenge dataset, to classify five common ECG findings: myocardial infarction (MI), atrial fibrillation, hypertrophy, conduction disturbance, and ST/T changes. Our approach, built upon the ConvNeXt backbone, outperforms a single-source training baseline and achieved \textbf{1st} place in the challenge with an macro-AUROC of \textbf{0.9677}. These results suggest that incorporating morphology learning from heterogeneous sources offers a more robust and generalizable paradigm than conventional single-source training.

Xiaoyu Wang
Ramesh Nadarajah
Zhiqiang Zhang
David Wong


Permanent Data Encoding (PDE): A Visual Language for Semantic Compression and Knowledge Preservation in 3-Character Units

Abstract: Permanent Data Encoding (PDE) is a visual language framework designed for long-term, human-readable, and electrically independent knowledge preservation. By encoding semantic content into compact 2-3 character alphanumeric codes, paired with public dictionaries and rule-based expansion structures, PDE enables information to be visually interpreted and logically reconstructed without reliance on digital systems. Unlike QR codes or binary data, PDE offers a transparent and self-contained method of encoding meaning. This paper outlines the PDE syntax, dictionary protocol, use cases in disaster resilience and AI integration, and its implications as a cross-generational semantic infrastructure.

Yoshiharu Tsuyuki
Xianqi Li
Yuji Kurihara
Kenji Mitsudo


Handling Out-of-Distribution Data: A Survey

Abstract: In the field of Machine Learning (ML) and data-driven applications, one of the significant challenge is the change in data distribution between the training and deployment stages, commonly known as distribution shift. This paper outlines different mechanisms for handling two main types of distribution shifts: (i) Covariate shift: where the value of features or covariates change between train and test data, and (ii) Concept/Semantic-shift: where model experiences shift in the concept learned during training due to emergence of novel classes in the test phase. We sum up our contributions in three folds. First, we formalize distribution shifts, recite on how the conventional method fails to handle them adequately and urge for a model that can simultaneously perform better in all types of distribution shifts. Second, we discuss why handling distribution shifts is important and provide an extensive review of the methods and techniques that have been developed to detect, measure, and mitigate the effects of these shifts. Third, we discuss the current state of distribution shift handling mechanisms and propose future research directions in this area. Overall, we provide a retrospective synopsis of the literature in the distribution shift, focusing on OOD data that had been overlooked in the existing surveys.

Lakpa Tamang
Mohamed Reda Bouadjenek
Richard Dazeley
Sunil Aryal

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering


C2G-KD: PCA-Constrained Generator for Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

Abstract: We introduce C2G-KD, a data-free knowledge distillation framework where a class-conditional generator is trained to produce synthetic samples guided by a frozen teacher model and geometric constraints derived from PCA. The generator never observes real training data but instead learns to activate the teacher's output through a combination of semantic and structural losses. By constraining generated samples to lie within class-specific PCA subspaces estimated from as few as two real examples per class, we preserve topological consistency and diversity. Experiments on MNIST show that even minimal class structure is sufficient to bootstrap useful synthetic training pipelines.


Synthetic Data Augmentation for Enhanced Chicken Carcass Instance Segmentation

Abstract: The poultry industry has been driven by broiler chicken production and has grown into the world's largest animal protein sector. Automated detection of chicken carcasses on processing lines is vital for quality control, food safety, and operational efficiency in slaughterhouses and poultry processing plants. However, developing robust deep learning models for tasks like instance segmentation in these fast-paced industrial environments is often hampered by the need for laborious acquisition and annotation of large-scale real-world image datasets. We present the first pipeline generating photo-realistic, automatically labeled synthetic images of chicken carcasses. We also introduce a new benchmark dataset containing 300 annotated real-world images, curated specifically for poultry segmentation research. Using these datasets, this study investigates the efficacy of synthetic data and automatic data annotation to enhance the instance segmentation of chicken carcasses, particularly when real annotated data from the processing line is scarce. A small real dataset with varying proportions of synthetic images was evaluated in prominent instance segmentation models. Results show that synthetic data significantly boosts segmentation performance for chicken carcasses across all models. This research underscores the value of synthetic data augmentation as a viable and effective strategy to mitigate data scarcity, reduce manual annotation efforts, and advance the development of robust AI-driven automated detection systems for chicken carcasses in the poultry processing industry.

Yihong Feng
Chaitanya Pallerla
Xiaomin Lin
Pouya Sohrabipour
Philip Crandall
Wan Shou
Yu She
Dongyi Wang

IEEE Transactions on AgriFood Electronics


Small Data Explainer -- The impact of small data methods in everyday life

Abstract: The emergence of breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has led to a renewed focus on how small data settings, i.e., settings with limited information, can benefit from such developments. This includes societal issues such as how best to include under-represented groups in data-driven policy and decision making, or the health benefits of assistive technologies such as wearables. We provide a conceptual overview, in particular contrasting small data with big data, and identify common themes from exemplary case studies and application areas. Potential solutions are described in a more detailed technical overview of current data analysis and modelling techniques, highlighting contributions from different disciplines, such as knowledge-driven modelling from statistics and data-driven modelling from computer science. By linking application settings, conceptual contributions and specific techniques, we highlight what is already feasible and suggest what an agenda for fully leveraging small data might look like.

the Collaborative Research Center 1597 Small Data


Class-Proportional Coreset Selection for Difficulty-Separable Data

Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for building reliable and efficient machine learning systems. One-shot coreset selection addresses this by pruning the dataset while maintaining or even improving model performance, often relying on training-dynamics-based data difficulty scores. However, most existing methods implicitly assume class-wise homogeneity in data difficulty, overlooking variation in data difficulty across different classes. In this work, we challenge this assumption by showing that, in domains such as network intrusion detection and medical imaging, data difficulty often clusters by class. We formalize this as class-difficulty separability and introduce the Class Difficulty Separability Coefficient (CDSC) as a quantitative measure. We demonstrate that high CDSC values correlate with performance degradation in class-agnostic coreset methods, which tend to overrepresent easy majority classes while neglecting rare but informative ones. To address this, we introduce class-proportional variants of multiple sampling strategies. Evaluated on five diverse datasets spanning security and medical domains, our methods consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. For instance, on CTU-13, at an extreme 99% pruning rate, a class-proportional variant of Coverage-centric Coreset Selection (CCS-CP) shows remarkable stability, with accuracy dropping only 2.58%, precision 0.49%, and recall 0.19%. In contrast, the class-agnostic CCS baseline, the next best method, suffers sharper declines of 7.59% in accuracy, 4.57% in precision, and 4.11% in recall. We further show that aggressive pruning enhances generalization in noisy, imbalanced, and large-scale datasets. Our results underscore that explicitly modeling class-difficulty separability leads to more effective, robust, and generalizable data pruning, particularly in high-stakes scenarios.


Investigating the Reliability of the AfriTEC Model During the Descending Phase of Solar Cycle 24 Across East Africa

Abstract: This study investigates the reliability of the African Regional Ionospheric Total Electron Content (AfriTEC) model during the descending phase of Solar Cycle 24 (2016-2017) across East Africa. Using GNSS-derived TEC data from five equatorial and low-latitude stations MOIU, MAL2, ZAMB, ADIS, and MBAR the model's performance is assessed through statistical metrics, including Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and correlation coefficient r. Results indicate that the AfriTEC model effectively captures the diurnal and seasonal behavior of TEC, particularly during equinoxes, with MAE values generally below 1.5 TECU and correlation coefficients exceeding 0.80. However, discrepancies emerge during solstice periods and post-sunset hours, reflecting the model's limitations in representing complex ionospheric processes such as the Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA). To benchmark its performance, AfriTEC is also compared against the widely used NeQuick model. AfriTEC demonstrates superior regional adaptability and reduced error under most conditions, though it remains sensitive to localized ionospheric disturbances. These findings suggest that while AfriTEC is a valuable tool for ionospheric modeling in whole Africa especially at East African sector, enhancements incorporating real-time solar and geomagnetic indices could further improve its predictive capabilities.

Efrem Amanuel Data
Daniel Izuikedinachi Okoh
Emmanuel Daudi Sulungu
Dejene Ambisa Terefe


Efficient Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Data and Adaptive Dropout

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising distributed machine learning approach that enables collaborative training of a global model using multiple edge devices. The data distributed among the edge devices is highly heterogeneous. Thus, FL faces the challenge of data distribution and heterogeneity, where non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data across edge devices may yield in significant accuracy drop. Furthermore, the limited computation and communication capabilities of edge devices increase the likelihood of stragglers, thus leading to slow model convergence. In this paper, we propose the FedDHAD FL framework, which comes with two novel methods: Dynamic Heterogeneous model aggregation (FedDH) and Adaptive Dropout (FedAD). FedDH dynamically adjusts the weights of each local model within the model aggregation process based on the non-IID degree of heterogeneous data to deal with the statistical data heterogeneity. FedAD performs neuron-adaptive operations in response to heterogeneous devices to improve accuracy while achieving superb efficiency. The combination of these two methods makes FedDHAD significantly outperform state-of-the-art solutions in terms of accuracy (up to 6.7% higher), efficiency (up to 2.02 times faster), and computation cost (up to 15.0% smaller).

Ji Liu
Beichen Ma
Qiaolin Yu
Ruoming Jin
Jingbo Zhou
Yang Zhou
Huaiyu Dai
Haixun Wang
Dejing Dou
Patrick Valduriez


SynthGuard: Redefining Synthetic Data Generation with a Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Workflow Framework

Abstract: The growing reliance on data-driven applications in sectors such as healthcare, finance, and law enforcement underscores the need for secure, privacy-preserving, and scalable mechanisms for data generation and sharing. Synthetic data generation (SDG) has emerged as a promising approach but often relies on centralized or external processing, raising concerns about data sovereignty, domain ownership, and compliance with evolving regulatory standards. To overcome these issues, we introduce SynthGuard, a framework designed to ensure computational governance by enabling data owners to maintain control over SDG workflows. SynthGuard supports modular and privacy-preserving workflows, ensuring secure, auditable, and reproducible execution across diverse environments. In this paper, we demonstrate how SynthGuard addresses the complexities at the intersection of domain-specific needs and scalable SDG by aligning with requirements for data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. Developed iteratively with domain expert input, SynthGuard has been validated through real-world use cases, demonstrating its ability to balance security, privacy, and scalability while ensuring compliance. The evaluation confirms its effectiveness in implementing and executing SDG workflows and integrating privacy and utility assessments across various computational environments.

Eduardo Brito
Mahmoud Shoush
Kristian Tamm
Paula Etti
Liina Kamm


Towards Benchmarking Foundation Models for Tabular Data With Text

Abstract: Foundation models for tabular data are rapidly evolving, with increasing interest in extending them to support additional modalities such as free-text features. However, existing benchmarks for tabular data rarely include textual columns, and identifying real-world tabular datasets with semantically rich text features is non-trivial. We propose a series of simple yet effective ablation-style strategies for incorporating text into conventional tabular pipelines. Moreover, we benchmark how state-of-the-art tabular foundation models can handle textual data by manually curating a collection of real-world tabular datasets with meaningful textual features. Our study is an important step towards improving benchmarking of foundation models for tabular data with text.

Martin Mráz
Breenda Das
Anshul Gupta
Lennart Purucker
Frank Hutter


Universal Embeddings of Tabular Data

Abstract: Tabular data in relational databases represents a significant portion of industrial data. Hence, analyzing and interpreting tabular data is of utmost importance. Application tasks on tabular data are manifold and are often not specified when setting up an industrial database. To address this, we present a novel framework for generating universal, i.e., task-independent embeddings of tabular data for performing downstream tasks without predefined targets. Our method transforms tabular data into a graph structure, leverages Graph Auto-Encoders to create entity embeddings, which are subsequently aggregated to obtain embeddings for each table row, i.e., each data sample. This two-step approach has the advantage that unseen samples, consisting of similar entities, can be embedded without additional training. Downstream tasks such as regression, classification or outlier detection, can then be performed by applying a distance-based similarity measure in the embedding space. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to existing universal tabular data embedding techniques.

Astrid Franz
Frederik Hoppe
Marianne Michaelis
Udo Göbel


Voltage Regulation in Distribution Systems with Data Center Loads

Abstract: Recent boom in foundation models and AI computing have raised growing concerns on the power and energy trajectories of large-scale data centers. This paper focuses on the voltage issues caused by volatile and intensity of data center power demand, which also aligns with recent observations of more frequent voltage disturbances in power grids. To address these data center integration challenges, we propose a dynamic voltage control scheme by harnessing data center's load regulation capabilities. By taking local voltage measurements and adjusting power injections at each data center buses through the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) scheme, we are able to maintain safe voltage magnitude in a distributed fashion with higher data center computing load. Simulations using real large language model (LLM) inference load validate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism. Both the LLM power data and proposed control scheme are open sourced.


Backdoors in Conditional Diffusion: Threats to Responsible Synthetic Data Pipelines

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models achieve high-fidelity image generation from natural language prompts. ControlNets extend these models by enabling conditioning on structural inputs (e.g., edge maps, depth, pose), providing fine-grained control over outputs. Yet their reliance on large, publicly scraped datasets and community fine-tuning makes them vulnerable to data poisoning. We introduce a model-poisoning attack that embeds a covert backdoor into a ControlNet, causing it to produce attacker-specified content when exposed to visual triggers, without textual prompts. Experiments show that poisoning only 1% of the fine-tuning corpus yields a 90-98% attack success rate, while 5% further strengthens the backdoor, all while preserving normal generation quality. To mitigate this risk, we propose clean fine-tuning (CFT): freezing the diffusion backbone and fine-tuning only the ControlNet on a sanitized dataset with a reduced learning rate. CFT lowers attack success rates on held-out data. These results expose a critical security weakness in open-source, ControlNet-guided diffusion pipelines and demonstrate that CFT offers a practical defense for responsible synthetic-data pipelines.

AAAI 2026 Workshop on Shaping Responsible Synthetic Data in the Era of Foundation Models


ChangeBridge: Spatiotemporal Image Generation with Multimodal Controls for Remote Sensing

Abstract: Spatiotemporal image generation is a highly meaningful task, which can generate future scenes conditioned on given observations. However, existing change generation methods can only handle event-driven changes (e.g., new buildings) and fail to model cross-temporal variations (e.g., seasonal shifts). In this work, we propose ChangeBridge, a conditional spatiotemporal image generation model for remote sensing. Given pre-event images and multimodal event controls, ChangeBridge generates post-event scenes that are both spatially and temporally coherent. The core idea is a drift-asynchronous diffusion bridge. Specifically, it consists of three main modules: a) Composed Bridge Initialization, which replaces noise initialization. It starts the diffusion from a composed pre-event state, modeling a diffusion bridge process. b) Asynchronous Drift Diffusion, which uses a pixel-wise drift map, assigning different drift magnitudes to event and temporal evolution. This enables differentiated generation during the pre-to-post transition. c) Drift-Aware Denoising, which embeds the drift map into the denoising network, guiding drift-aware reconstruction. Experiments show that ChangeBridge can generate better cross-spatiotemporal aligned scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ChangeBridge shows great potential for land-use planning and as a data generation engine for a series of change detection tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenghuizhao/ChangeBridge

Zhenghui Zhao
Chen Wu
Xiangyong Cao
Di Wang
Hongruixuan Chen
Datao Tang
Liangpei Zhang
Zhuo Zheng


When Data-Free Knowledge Distillation Meets Non-Transferable Teacher: Escaping Out-of-Distribution Trap is All You Need

Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) transfers knowledge from a teacher to a student without access the real in-distribution (ID) data. Its common solution is to use a generator to synthesize fake data and use them as a substitute for real ID data. However, existing works typically assume teachers are trustworthy, leaving the robustness and security of DFKD from untrusted teachers largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first investigation into distilling non-transferable learning (NTL) teachers using DFKD, where the transferability from an ID domain to an out-of-distribution (OOD) domain is prohibited. We find that NTL teachers fool DFKD through divert the generator's attention from the useful ID knowledge to the misleading OOD knowledge. This hinders ID knowledge transfer but prioritizes OOD knowledge transfer. To mitigate this issue, we propose Adversarial Trap Escaping (ATEsc) to benefit DFKD by identifying and filtering out OOD-like synthetic samples. Specifically, inspired by the evidence that NTL teachers show stronger adversarial robustness on OOD samples than ID samples, we split synthetic samples into two groups according to their robustness. The fragile group is treated as ID-like data and used for normal knowledge distillation, while the robust group is seen as OOD-like data and utilized for forgetting OOD knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ATEsc for improving DFKD against NTL teachers. Code is released at https://github.com/tmllab/2025_ICML_ATEsc.

Ziming Hong
Runnan Chen
Zengmao Wang
Bo Han
Bo Du
Tongliang Liu

International Conference on Machine Learning


Exploring LLM Capabilities in Extracting DCAT-Compatible Metadata for Data Cataloging

Abstract: Efficient data exploration is crucial as data becomes increasingly important for accelerating processes, improving forecasts and developing new business models. Data consumers often spend 25-98 % of their time searching for suitable data due to the exponential growth, heterogeneity and distribution of data. Data catalogs can support and accelerate data exploration by using metadata to answer user queries. However, as metadata creation and maintenance is often a manual process, it is time-consuming and requires expertise. This study investigates whether LLMs can automate metadata maintenance of text-based data and generate high-quality DCAT-compatible metadata. We tested zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies with LLMs from different vendors for generating metadata such as titles and keywords, along with a fine-tuned model for classification. Our results show that LLMs can generate metadata comparable to human-created content, particularly on tasks that require advanced semantic understanding. Larger models outperformed smaller ones, and fine-tuning significantly improves classification accuracy, while few-shot prompting yields better results in most cases. Although LLMs offer a faster and reliable way to create metadata, a successful application requires careful consideration of task-specific criteria and domain context.

Lennart Busch
Daniel Tebernum
Gissel Velarde

International Conference on Data Technologies and Applications


Instant Particle Size Distribution Measurement Using CNNs Trained on Synthetic Data

Abstract: Accurate particle size distribution (PSD) measurement is important in industries such as mining, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer manufacturing, significantly influencing product quality and operational efficiency. Traditional PSD methods like sieve analysis and laser diffraction are manual, time-consuming, and limited by particle overlap. Recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) enable automated, real-time PSD estimation directly from particle images. In this work, we present a CNN-based methodology trained on realistic synthetic particle imagery generated using Blender's advanced rendering capabilities. Synthetic data sets using this method can replicate various industrial scenarios by systematically varying particle shapes, textures, lighting, and spatial arrangements that closely resemble the actual configurations. We evaluated three CNN-based architectures, ResNet-50, InceptionV3, and EfficientNet-B0, for predicting critical PSD parameters (d10, d50, d90). Results demonstrated comparable accuracy across models, with EfficientNet-B0 achieving the best computational efficiency suitable for real-time industrial deployment. This approach shows the effectiveness of realistic synthetic data for robust CNN training, which offers significant potential for automated industrial PSD monitoring. The code is released at : https://github.com/YasserElj/Synthetic-Granular-Gen

Yasser El Jarida
Youssef Iraqi
Loubna Mekouar


Puzzles: Unbounded Video-Depth Augmentation for Scalable End-to-End 3D Reconstruction

Abstract: Multi-view 3D reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer vision. Recent methods, such as DUST3R and its successors, directly regress pointmaps from image pairs without relying on known scene geometry or camera parameters. However, the performance of these models is constrained by the diversity and scale of available training data. In this work, we introduce Puzzles, a data augmentation strategy that synthesizes an unbounded volume of high-quality posed video-depth data from a single image or video clip. By simulating diverse camera trajectories and realistic scene geometry through targeted image transformations, Puzzles significantly enhances data variety. Extensive experiments show that integrating Puzzles into existing video-based 3D reconstruction pipelines consistently boosts performance without modifying the underlying network architecture. Notably, models trained on only ten percent of the original data augmented with Puzzles still achieve accuracy comparable to those trained on the full dataset. Code is available at https://jiahao-ma.github.io/puzzles/.

Jiahao Ma
Lei Wang
Miaomiao liu
David Ahmedt-Aristizabal
Chuong Nguyen


Accessible Data Access and Analysis by People who are Blind or Have Low Vision

Abstract: Our work aims to develop new assistive technologies that enable blind or low vision (BLV) people to explore and analyze data readily. At present, barriers exist for BLV people to explore and analyze data, restricting access to government, health and personal data, and limiting employment opportunities. This work explores the co-design and development of an innovative system to support data access, with a focus on the use of refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) and conversational agents. The envisaged system will use a combination of tactile graphics and speech to communicate with BLV users, and proactively assist with data analysis tasks. As well as addressing significant equity gaps, our work expects to produce innovations in assistive technology, multimodal interfaces, dialogue systems, and natural language understanding and generation.

Samuel Reinders
Munazza Zaib
Matthew Butler
Bongshin Lee
Ingrid Zukerman
Lizhen Qu
Kim Marriott


FairCauseSyn: Towards Causally Fair LLM-Augmented Synthetic Data Generation

Abstract: Synthetic data generation creates data based on real-world data using generative models. In health applications, generating high-quality data while maintaining fairness for sensitive attributes is essential for equitable outcomes. Existing GAN-based and LLM-based methods focus on counterfactual fairness and are primarily applied in finance and legal domains. Causal fairness provides a more comprehensive evaluation framework by preserving causal structure, but current synthetic data generation methods do not address it in health settings. To fill this gap, we develop the first LLM-augmented synthetic data generation method to enhance causal fairness using real-world tabular health data. Our generated data deviates by less than 10% from real data on causal fairness metrics. When trained on causally fair predictors, synthetic data reduces bias on the sensitive attribute by 70% compared to real data. This work improves access to fair synthetic data, supporting equitable health research and healthcare delivery.

Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society


Modeling and Visualization Reasoning for Stakeholders in Education and Industry Integration Systems: Research on Structured Synthetic Dialogue Data Generation Based on NIST Standards

Abstract: This study addresses the structural complexity and semantic ambiguity in stakeholder interactions within the Education-Industry Integration (EII) system. The scarcity of real interview data, absence of structured variable modeling, and lack of interpretability in inference mechanisms have limited the analytical accuracy and policy responsiveness of EII research. To resolve these challenges, we propose a structural modeling paradigm based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) synthetic data quality framework, focusing on consistency, authenticity, and traceability. We design a five-layer architecture that includes prompt-driven synthetic dialogue generation, a structured variable system covering skills, institutional, and emotional dimensions, dependency and causal path modeling, graph-based structure design, and an interactive inference engine. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach using a 15-segment synthetic corpus, with 41,597 tokens, 127 annotated variables, and 820 semantic relationship triples. The model exhibits strong structural consistency (Krippendorff alpha = 0.83), construct validity (RMSEA = 0.048, CFI = 0.93), and semantic alignment (mean cosine similarity > 0.78 via BERT). A key causal loop is identified: system mismatch leads to emotional frustration, reduced participation, skill gaps, and recurrence of mismatch, revealing a structural degradation cycle. This research introduces the first NIST-compliant AI modeling framework for stakeholder systems and provides a foundation for policy simulation, curriculum design, and collaborative strategy modeling.


Synthetic ALS-EEG Data Augmentation for ALS Diagnosis Using Conditional WGAN with Weight Clipping

Abstract: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a rare neurodegenerative disease, and high-quality EEG data from ALS patients are scarce. This data scarcity, coupled with severe class imbalance between ALS and healthy control recordings, poses a challenge for training reliable machine learning classifiers. In this work, we address these issues by generating synthetic EEG signals for ALS patients using a Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (CWGAN). We train CWGAN on a private EEG dataset (ALS vs. non-ALS) to learn the distribution of ALS EEG signals and produce realistic synthetic samples. We preprocess and normalize EEG recordings, and train a CWGAN model to generate synthetic ALS signals. The CWGAN architecture and training routine are detailed, with key hyperparameters chosen for stable training. Qualitative evaluation of generated signals shows that they closely mimic real ALS EEG patterns. The CWGAN training converged with generator and discriminator loss curves stabilizing, indicating successful learning. The synthetic EEG signals appear realistic and have potential use as augmented data for training classifiers, helping to mitigate class imbalance and improve ALS detection accuracy. We discuss how this approach can facilitate data sharing and enhance diagnostic models.

Abdulvahap Mutlu
Şengül Doğan
Türker Tuncer


Job Market Cheat Codes: Prototyping Salary Prediction and Job Grouping with Synthetic Job Listings

Abstract: This paper presents a machine learning methodology prototype using a large synthetic dataset of job listings to identify trends, predict salaries, and group similar job roles. Employing techniques such as regression, classification, clustering, and natural language processing (NLP) for text-based feature extraction and representation, this study aims to uncover the key features influencing job market dynamics and provide valuable insights for job seekers, employers, and researchers. Exploratory data analysis was conducted to understand the dataset's characteristics. Subsequently, regression models were developed to predict salaries, classification models to predict job titles, and clustering techniques were applied to group similar jobs. The analyses revealed significant factors influencing salary and job roles, and identified distinct job clusters based on the provided data. While the results are based on synthetic data and not intended for real-world deployment, the methodology demonstrates a transferable framework for job market analysis.

Abdel Rahman Alsheyab
Mohammad Alkhasawneh
Nidal Shahin


Data-driven approaches to inverse problems

Abstract: Inverse problems are concerned with the reconstruction of unknown physical quantities using indirect measurements and are fundamental across diverse fields such as medical imaging, remote sensing, and material sciences. These problems serve as critical tools for visualizing internal structures beyond what is visible to the naked eye, enabling quantification, diagnosis, prediction, and discovery. However, most inverse problems are ill-posed, necessitating robust mathematical treatment to yield meaningful solutions. While classical approaches provide mathematically rigorous and computationally stable solutions, they are constrained by the ability to accurately model solution properties and implement them efficiently. A more recent paradigm considers deriving solutions to inverse problems in a data-driven manner. Instead of relying on classical mathematical modeling, this approach utilizes highly over-parameterized models, typically deep neural networks, which are adapted to specific inverse problems using carefully selected training data. Current approaches that follow this new paradigm distinguish themselves through solution accuracy paired with computational efficiency that was previously inconceivable. These notes offer an introduction to this data-driven paradigm for inverse problems. The first part of these notes will provide an introduction to inverse problems, discuss classical solution strategies, and present some applications. The second part will delve into modern data-driven approaches, with a particular focus on adversarial regularization and provably convergent linear plug-and-play denoisers. Throughout the presentation of these methodologies, their theoretical properties will be discussed, and numerical examples will be provided. The lecture series will conclude with a discussion of open problems and future perspectives in the field.

Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Zakhar Shumaylov


Synthetic Human Action Video Data Generation with Pose Transfer

Abstract: In video understanding tasks, particularly those involving human motion, synthetic data generation often suffers from uncanny features, diminishing its effectiveness for training. Tasks such as sign language translation, gesture recognition, and human motion understanding in autonomous driving have thus been unable to exploit the full potential of synthetic data. This paper proposes a method for generating synthetic human action video data using pose transfer (specifically, controllable 3D Gaussian avatar models). We evaluate this method on the Toyota Smarthome and NTU RGB+D datasets and show that it improves performance in action recognition tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that the method can effectively scale few-shot datasets, making up for groups underrepresented in the real training data and adding diverse backgrounds. We open-source the method along with RANDOM People, a dataset with videos and avatars of novel human identities for pose transfer crowd-sourced from the internet.


PGDA-KGQA: A Prompt-Guided Generative Framework with Multiple Data Augmentation Strategies for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Abstract: Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) is a crucial task in natural language processing that requires reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) to answer natural language questions. Recent methods utilizing large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable semantic parsing capabilities but are limited by the scarcity of diverse annotated data and multi-hop reasoning samples. Traditional data augmentation approaches are focus mainly on single-hop questions and prone to semantic distortion, while LLM-based methods primarily address semantic distortion but usually neglect multi-hop reasoning, thus limiting data diversity. The scarcity of multi-hop samples further weakens models' generalization. To address these issues, we propose PGDA-KGQA, a prompt-guided generative framework with multiple data augmentation strategies for KGQA. At its core, PGDA-KGQA employs a unified prompt-design paradigm: by crafting meticulously engineered prompts that integrate the provided textual content, it leverages LLMs to generate large-scale (question, logical form) pairs for model training. Specifically, PGDA-KGQA enriches its training set by: (1) generating single-hop pseudo questions to improve the alignment of question semantics with KG relations; (2) applying semantic-preserving question rewriting to improve robustness against linguistic variations; (3) employing answer-guided reverse path exploration to create realistic multi-hop questions. By adopting an augment-generate-retrieve semantic parsing pipeline, PGDA-KGQA utilizes the augmented data to enhance the accuracy of logical form generation and thus improve answer retrieval performance. Experiments demonstrate that outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard KGQA datasets, achieving improvements on WebQSP by 2.8%, 1.2%, and 3.1% and on ComplexWebQuestions by 1.8%, 1.1%, and 2.4% in F1, Hits@1, and Accuracy, respectively.


Patient Similarity Computation for Clinical Decision Support: An Efficient Use of Data Transformation, Combining Static and Time Series Data

Abstract: Patient similarity computation (PSC) is a fundamental problem in healthcare informatics. The aim of the patient similarity computation is to measure the similarity among patients according to their historical clinical records, which helps to improve clinical decision support. This paper presents a novel distributed patient similarity computation (DPSC) technique based on data transformation (DT) methods, utilizing an effective combination of time series and static data. Time series data are sensor-collected patients' information, including metrics like heart rate, blood pressure, Oxygen saturation, respiration, etc. The static data are mainly patient background and demographic data, including age, weight, height, gender, etc. Static data has been used for clustering the patients. Before feeding the static data to the machine learning model adaptive Weight-of-Evidence (aWOE) and Z-score data transformation (DT) methods have been performed, which improve the prediction performances. In aWOE-based patient similarity models, sensitive patient information has been processed using aWOE which preserves the data privacy of the trained models. We used the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) approach, which is robust and very popular, for time series similarity. However, DTW is not suitable for big data due to the significant computational run-time. To overcome this problem, distributed DTW computation is used in this study. For Coronary Artery Disease, our DT based approach boosts prediction performance by as much as 11.4%, 10.20%, and 12.6% in terms of AUC, accuracy, and F-measure, respectively. In the case of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), our proposed method achieves performance enhancement up to 15.9%, 10.5%, and 21.9% for the same measures, respectively. The proposed method reduces the computation time by as high as 40%.

Joydeb Kumar Sana
Mohammad M. Masud
M Sohel Rahman
M Saifur Rahman


Learning based on neurovectors for tabular data: a new neural network approach

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel learning approach based on Neurovectors, an innovative paradigm that structures information through interconnected nodes and vector relationships for tabular data processing. Unlike traditional artificial neural networks that rely on weight adjustment through backpropagation, Neurovectors encode information by structuring data in vector spaces where energy propagation, rather than traditional weight updates, drives the learning process, enabling a more adaptable and explainable learning process. Our method generates dynamic representations of knowledge through neurovectors, thereby improving both the interpretability and efficiency of the predictive model. Experimental results using datasets from well-established repositories such as the UCI machine learning repository and Kaggle are reported both for classification and regression. To evaluate its performance, we compare our approach with standard machine learning and deep learning models, showing that Neurovectors achieve competitive accuracy.

J. C. Husillos
A. Gallego
A. Roma
A. Troncoso


An Active Learning-Based Streaming Pipeline for Reduced Data Training of Structure Finding Models in Neutron Diffractometry

Abstract: Structure determination workloads in neutron diffractometry are computationally expensive and routinely require several hours to many days to determine the structure of a material from its neutron diffraction patterns. The potential for machine learning models trained on simulated neutron scattering patterns to significantly speed up these tasks have been reported recently. However, the amount of simulated data needed to train these models grows exponentially with the number of structural parameters to be predicted and poses a significant computational challenge. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel batch-mode active learning (AL) policy that uses uncertainty sampling to simulate training data drawn from a probability distribution that prefers labelled examples about which the model is least certain. We confirm its efficacy in training the same models with about 75% less training data while improving the accuracy. We then discuss the design of an efficient stream-based training workflow that uses this AL policy and present a performance study on two heterogeneous platforms to demonstrate that, compared with a conventional training workflow, the streaming workflow delivers about 20% shorter training time without any loss of accuracy.

Tianle Wang
Jorge Ramirez
Cristina Garcia-Cardona
Thomas Proffen
Shantenu Jha
Sudip K. Seal


LAM SIMULATOR: Advancing Data Generation for Large Action Model Training via Online Exploration and Trajectory Feedback

Abstract: Large Action Models (LAMs) for AI Agents offer incredible potential but face challenges due to the need for high-quality training data, especially for multi-steps tasks that involve planning, executing tool calls, and responding to feedback. To address these issues, we present LAM SIMULATOR, a comprehensive framework designed for online exploration of agentic tasks with high-quality feedback. Our framework features a dynamic task query generator, an extensive collection of tools, and an interactive environment where Large Language Model (LLM) Agents can call tools and receive real-time feedback. This setup enables LLM Agents to explore and solve tasks autonomously, facilitating the discovery of multiple approaches to tackle any given task. The resulting action trajectory data are then used to create high-quality training datasets for LAMs. Our experiments on popular agentic benchmarks, ToolBench and CRMArena, highlight the effectiveness of LAM SIMULATOR: models trained with self-generated datasets using our framework achieve significant performance gains, up to a 49.3\% improvement over their original baselines. LAM SIMULATOR requires minimal human input during dataset creation, highlighting LAM SIMULATOR's efficiency and effectiveness in speeding up development of AI agents.

Thai Hoang
Kung-Hsiang Huang
Shirley Kokane
Jianguo Zhang
Zuxin Liu
Ming Zhu
Jake Grigsby
Tian Lan
Michael S Ryoo
Chien-Sheng Wu
Shelby Heinecke
Huan Wang
Silvio Savarese
Caiming Xiong
Juan Carlos Niebles

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics


Improving Knowledge Distillation Under Unknown Covariate Shift Through Confidence-Guided Data Augmentation

Abstract: Large foundation models trained on extensive datasets demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities in various domains. To replicate their success when data and model size are constrained, knowledge distillation has become an established tool for transferring knowledge from foundation models to small student networks. However, the effectiveness of distillation is critically limited by the available training data. This work addresses the common practical issue of covariate shift in knowledge distillation, where spurious features appear during training but not at test time. We ask the question: when these spurious features are unknown, yet a robust teacher is available, is it possible for a student to also become robust to them? We address this problem by introducing a novel diffusion-based data augmentation strategy that generates images by maximizing the disagreement between the teacher and the student, effectively creating challenging samples that the student struggles with. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves worst group and mean group accuracy on CelebA and SpuCo Birds as well as the spurious mAUC on spurious ImageNet under covariate shift, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion-based data augmentation baselines

Niclas Popp
Kevin Alexander Laube
Matthias Hein
Lukas Schott


Data Heterogeneity Modeling for Trustworthy Machine Learning

Abstract: Data heterogeneity plays a pivotal role in determining the performance of machine learning (ML) systems. Traditional algorithms, which are typically designed to optimize average performance, often overlook the intrinsic diversity within datasets. This oversight can lead to a myriad of issues, including unreliable decision-making, inadequate generalization across different domains, unfair outcomes, and false scientific inferences. Hence, a nuanced approach to modeling data heterogeneity is essential for the development of dependable, data-driven systems. In this survey paper, we present a thorough exploration of heterogeneity-aware machine learning, a paradigm that systematically integrates considerations of data heterogeneity throughout the entire ML pipeline -- from data collection and model training to model evaluation and deployment. By applying this approach to a variety of critical fields, including healthcare, agriculture, finance, and recommendation systems, we demonstrate the substantial benefits and potential of heterogeneity-aware ML. These applications underscore how a deeper understanding of data diversity can enhance model robustness, fairness, and reliability and help model diagnosis and improvements. Moreover, we delve into future directions and provide research opportunities for the whole data mining community, aiming to promote the development of heterogeneity-aware ML.


Data Swarms: Optimizable Generation of Synthetic Evaluation Data

Abstract: We propose Data Swarms, an algorithm to optimize the generation of synthetic evaluation data and advance quantitative desiderata of LLM evaluation. We first train a swarm of initial data generators using existing data, and define various evaluation objectives to reflect the desired properties of evaluation (e.g., generate more difficult problems for the evaluated models) and quantitatively evaluate data generators. We then employ particle swarm optimization to optimize the swarm of data generators, where they collaboratively search through the model parameter space to find new generators that advance these objectives. We further extend it to Adversarial Swarms, where the data generator swarm generates harder data while the test taker model swarm learns from such data, co-evolving dynamically for better data and models simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Data Swarms outperforms eight data generation baselines across five evaluation objectives, while Adversarial Swarms produce more robust learning of synthetic data and stronger generalization. Further analysis reveals that Data Swarms successfully optimizes compositions of multiple evaluation objectives and generalizes to new off-the-shelf LLMs, unseen at optimization time.

Shangbin Feng
Yike Wang
Weijia Shi
Yulia Tsvetkov


Harnessing Negative Signals: Reinforcement Distillation from Teacher Data for LLM Reasoning

Abstract: Recent advances in model distillation show that data from advanced reasoning models can effectively train smaller student models. However, standard practices discard incorrect reasoning traces -- valuable, yet underutilized data. This paper addresses the critical question: How can both positive and negative distilled reasoning traces be effectively leveraged to maximize LLM reasoning performance in an offline setting? We employ a two-stage training recipe: first, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on positive traces, followed by a refinement stage using both positive and negative traces. We find that a simple REINFORCE-style objective, which we term the Reinforcement Distillation (REDI) objective, outperforms established preference optimization methods like DPO and SimPO in this distillation context. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Notably, our Qwen-REDI-1.5B model, trained on just 131k traces from the open Open-R1 dataset, achieves an 83.1% score on MATH-500. Its performance matches that of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, a model trained on 800k proprietary data. This result showcases the remarkable data efficiency of utilizing previously discarded negative traces.

Shuyao Xu
Cheng Peng
Jiangxuan Long
Weidi Xu
Wei Chu
Yuan Qi


Synthetic Generation and Latent Projection Denoising of Rim Lesions in Multiple Sclerosis

Abstract: Quantitative susceptibility maps from magnetic resonance images can provide both prognostic and diagnostic information in multiple sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease characterized by the formation of lesions in white matter brain tissue. In particular, susceptibility maps provide adequate contrast to distinguish between "rim" lesions, surrounded by deposited paramagnetic iron, and "non-rim" lesion types. These paramagnetic rim lesions (PRLs) are an emerging biomarker in multiple sclerosis. Much effort has been devoted to both detection and segmentation of such lesions to monitor longitudinal change. As paramagnetic rim lesions are rare, addressing this problem requires confronting the class imbalance between rim and non-rim lesions. We produce synthetic quantitative susceptibility maps of paramagnetic rim lesions and show that inclusion of such synthetic data improves classifier performance and provide a multi-channel extension to generate accompanying contrasts and probabilistic segmentation maps. We exploit the projection capability of our trained generative network to demonstrate a novel denoising approach that allows us to train on ambiguous rim cases and substantially increase the minority class. We show that both synthetic lesion synthesis and our proposed rim lesion label denoising method best approximate the unseen rim lesion distribution and improve detection in a clinically interpretable manner. We release our code and generated data at https://github.com/agr78/PRLx-GAN upon publication.

Alexandra G. Roberts
Ha M. Luu
Mert Şişman
Alexey V. Dimov
Ceren Tozlu
Ilhami Kovanlikaya
Susan A. Gauthier
Thanh D. Nguyen
Yi Wang


Leveraging Diffusion Models for Synthetic Data Augmentation in Protein Subcellular Localization Classification

Abstract: We investigate whether synthetic images generated by diffusion models can enhance multi-label classification of protein subcellular localization. Specifically, we implement a simplified class-conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to produce label-consistent samples and explore their integration with real data via two hybrid training strategies: Mix Loss and Mix Representation. While these approaches yield promising validation performance, our proposed MixModel exhibits poor generalization to unseen test data, underscoring the challenges of leveraging synthetic data effectively. In contrast, baseline classifiers built on ResNet backbones with conventional loss functions demonstrate greater stability and test-time performance. Our findings highlight the importance of realistic data generation and robust supervision when incorporating generative augmentation into biomedical image classification.


A Cross Modal Knowledge Distillation & Data Augmentation Recipe for Improving Transcriptomics Representations through Morphological Features

Abstract: Understanding cellular responses to stimuli is crucial for biological discovery and drug development. Transcriptomics provides interpretable, gene-level insights, while microscopy imaging offers rich predictive features but is harder to interpret. Weakly paired datasets, where samples share biological states, enable multimodal learning but are scarce, limiting their utility for training and multimodal inference. We propose a framework to enhance transcriptomics by distilling knowledge from microscopy images. Using weakly paired data, our method aligns and binds modalities, enriching gene expression representations with morphological information. To address data scarcity, we introduce (1) Semi-Clipped, an adaptation of CLIP for cross-modal distillation using pretrained foundation models, achieving state-of-the-art results, and (2) PEA (Perturbation Embedding Augmentation), a novel augmentation technique that enhances transcriptomics data while preserving inherent biological information. These strategies improve the predictive power and retain the interpretability of transcriptomics, enabling rich unimodal representations for complex biological tasks.

Ihab Bendidi
Yassir El Mesbahi
Alisandra K. Denton
Karush Suri
Kian Kenyon-Dean
Auguste Genovesio
Emmanuel Noutahi


Conversational Lexicography: Querying Lexicographic Data on Knowledge Graphs with SPARQL through Natural Language

Abstract: Knowledge graphs offer an excellent solution for representing the lexical-semantic structures of lexicographic data. However, working with the SPARQL query language represents a considerable hurdle for many non-expert users who could benefit from the advantages of this technology. This paper addresses the challenge of creating natural language interfaces for lexicographic data retrieval on knowledge graphs such as Wikidata. We develop a multidimensional taxonomy capturing the complexity of Wikidata's lexicographic data ontology module through four dimensions and create a template-based dataset with over 1.2 million mappings from natural language utterances to SPARQL queries. Our experiments with GPT-2 (124M), Phi-1.5 (1.3B), and GPT-3.5-Turbo reveal significant differences in model capabilities. While all models perform well on familiar patterns, only GPT-3.5-Turbo demonstrates meaningful generalization capabilities, suggesting that model size and diverse pre-training are crucial for adaptability in this domain. However, significant challenges remain in achieving robust generalization, handling diverse linguistic data, and developing scalable solutions that can accommodate the full complexity of lexicographic knowledge representation.


Adaptive Indexing for Approximate Query Processing in Exploratory Data Analysis

Abstract: Minimizing data-to-analysis time while enabling real-time interaction and efficient analytical computations on large datasets are fundamental objectives of contemporary exploratory systems. Although some of the recent adaptive indexing and on-the-fly processing approaches address most of these needs, there are cases, where they do not always guarantee reliable performance. Some examples of such cases include: exploring areas with a high density of objects; executing the first exploratory queries or exploring previously unseen areas (where the index has not yet adapted sufficiently); and working with very large data files on commodity hardware, such as low-specification laptops. In such demanding cases, approximate and incremental techniques can be exploited to ensure efficiency and scalability by allowing users to prioritize response time over result accuracy, acknowledging that exact results are not always necessary. Therefore, approximation mechanisms that enable smooth user interaction by defining the trade-off between accuracy and performance based on vital factors (e.g., task, preferences, available resources) are of great importance. Considering the aforementioned, in this work, we present an adaptive approximate query processing framework for interactive on-the-fly analysis (with out a preprocessing phase) over large raw data. The core component of the framework is a main-memory adaptive indexing scheme (VALINOR-A) that interoperates with user-driven sampling and incremental aggregation computations. Additionally, an effective error-bounded approximation strategy is designed and integrated in the query processing process. We conduct extensive experiments using both real and synthetic datasets, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Stavros Maroulis
Nikos Bikakis
Vassilis Stamatopoulos
George Papastefanatos


What Does Information Science Offer for Data Science Research?: A Review of Data and Information Ethics Literature

Abstract: This paper reviews literature pertaining to the development of data science as a discipline, current issues with data bias and ethics, and the role that the discipline of information science may play in addressing these concerns. Information science research and researchers have much to offer for data science, owing to their background as transdisciplinary scholars who apply human-centered and social-behavioral perspectives to issues within natural science disciplines. Information science researchers have already contributed to a humanistic approach to data ethics within the literature and an emphasis on data science within information schools all but ensures that this literature will continue to grow in coming decades. This review article serves as a reference for the history, current progress, and potential future directions of data ethics research within the corpus of information science literature.


GraphGen: Enhancing Supervised Fine-Tuning for LLMs with Knowledge-Driven Synthetic Data Generation

Abstract: Fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs) typically requires substantial amounts of high-quality supervised data, which is both costly and labor-intensive to acquire. While synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising solution, existing approaches frequently suffer from factual inaccuracies, insufficient long-tail coverage, simplistic knowledge structures, and homogenized outputs. To address these challenges, we introduce GraphGen, a knowledge graph-guided framework designed for three key question-answering (QA) scenarios: atomic QA, aggregated QA, and multi-hop QA. It begins by constructing a fine-grained knowledge graph from the source text. It then identifies knowledge gaps in LLMs using the expected calibration error metric, prioritizing the generation of QA pairs that target high-value, long-tail knowledge. Furthermore, GraphGen incorporates multi-hop neighborhood sampling to capture complex relational information and employs style-controlled generation to diversify the resulting QA data. Experimental results on knowledge-intensive tasks under closed-book settings demonstrate that GraphGen outperforms conventional synthetic data methods, offering a more reliable and comprehensive solution to the data scarcity challenge in supervised fine-tuning. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/open-sciencelab/GraphGen.

Zihong Chen
Wanli Jiang
Jinzhe Li
Zhonghang Yuan
Huanjun Kong
Wanli Ouyang
Nanqing Dong


Mosaic: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Mixture-of-Experts for Heterogeneous Distributed Environments

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train models while preserving data privacy. However, the coexistence of model and data heterogeneity gives rise to inconsistent representations and divergent optimization dynamics across clients, ultimately hindering robust global performance. To transcend these challenges, we propose Mosaic, a novel data-free knowledge distillation framework tailored for heterogeneous distributed environments. Mosaic first trains local generative models to approximate each client's personalized distribution, enabling synthetic data generation that safeguards privacy through strict separation from real data. Subsequently, Mosaic forms a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) from client models based on their specialized knowledge, and distills it into a global model using the generated data. To further enhance the MoE architecture, Mosaic integrates expert predictions via a lightweight meta model trained on a few representative prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard image classification benchmarks demonstrate that Mosaic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model and data heterogeneity. The source code has been published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/Mosaic.

Junming Liu
Yanting Gao
Siyuan Meng
Yifei Sun
Aoqi Wu
Yufei Jin
Yirong Chen
Ding Wang
Guosun Zeng


Improving Heart Rejection Detection in XPCI Images Using Synthetic Data Augmentation

Abstract: Accurate identification of acute cellular rejection (ACR) in endomyocardial biopsies is essential for effective management of heart transplant patients. However, the rarity of high-grade rejection cases (3R) presents a significant challenge for training robust deep learning models. This work addresses the class imbalance problem by leveraging synthetic data generation using StyleGAN to augment the limited number of real 3R images. Prior to GAN training, histogram equalization was applied to standardize image appearance and improve the consistency of tissue representation. StyleGAN was trained on available 3R biopsy patches and subsequently used to generate 10,000 realistic synthetic images. These were combined with real 0R samples, that is samples without rejection, in various configurations to train ResNet-18 classifiers for binary rejection classification. Three classifier variants were evaluated: one trained on real 0R and synthetic 3R images, another using both synthetic and additional real samples, and a third trained solely on real data. All models were tested on an independent set of real biopsy images. Results demonstrate that synthetic data improves classification performance, particularly when used in combination with real samples. The highest-performing model, which used both real and synthetic images, achieved strong precision and recall for both classes. These findings underscore the value of hybrid training strategies and highlight the potential of GAN-based data augmentation in biomedical image analysis, especially in domains constrained by limited annotated datasets.

Jakov Samardžija
Donik Vršnak
Sven Lončarić


A Survey of LLM $\times$ DATA

Abstract: The integration of large language model (LLM) and data management (DATA) is rapidly redefining both domains. In this survey, we comprehensively review the bidirectional relationships. On the one hand, DATA4LLM, spanning large-scale data processing, storage, and serving, feeds LLMs with high quality, diversity, and timeliness of data required for stages like pre-training, post-training, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows: (i) Data processing for LLMs includes scalable acquisition, deduplication, filtering, selection, domain mixing, and synthetic augmentation; (ii) Data Storage for LLMs focuses on efficient data and model formats, distributed and heterogeneous storage hierarchies, KV-cache management, and fault-tolerant checkpointing; (iii) Data serving for LLMs tackles challenges in RAG (e.g., knowledge post-processing), LLM inference (e.g., prompt compression, data provenance), and training strategies (e.g., data packing and shuffling). On the other hand, in LLM4DATA, LLMs are emerging as general-purpose engines for data management. We review recent advances in (i) data manipulation, including automatic data cleaning, integration, discovery; (ii) data analysis, covering reasoning over structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and (iii) system optimization (e.g., configuration tuning, query rewriting, anomaly diagnosis), powered by LLM techniques like retrieval-augmented prompting, task-specialized fine-tuning, and multi-agent collaboration.

Xuanhe Zhou
Junxuan He
Wei Zhou
Haodong Chen
Zirui Tang
Haoyu Zhao
Xin Tong
Guoliang Li
Youmin Chen
Jun Zhou
Zhaojun Sun
Binyuan Hui
Shuo Wang
Conghui He
Zhiyuan Liu
Jingren Zhou
Fan Wu


4,500 Seconds: Small Data Training Approaches for Deep UAV Audio Classification

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) usage is expected to surge in the coming decade, raising the need for heightened security measures to prevent airspace violations and security threats. This study investigates deep learning approaches to UAV classification focusing on the key issue of data scarcity. To investigate this we opted to train the models using a total of 4,500 seconds of audio samples, evenly distributed across a 9-class dataset. We leveraged parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and data augmentations to mitigate the data scarcity. This paper implements and compares the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and attention-based transformers. Our results show that, CNNs outperform transformers by 1-2\% accuracy, while still being more computationally efficient. These early findings, however, point to potential in using transformers models; suggesting that with more data and further optimizations they could outperform CNNs. Future works aims to upscale the dataset to better understand the trade-offs between these approaches.


Score Distillation Beyond Acceleration: Generative Modeling from Corrupted Data

Abstract: Learning generative models directly from corrupted observations is a long standing challenge across natural and scientific domains. We introduce Restoration Score Distillation (RSD), a unified framework for learning high fidelity, one step generative models using only degraded data and the mapping $A$ may be the identity or a non invertible corruption operator (e.g., blur, masking, subsampling, Fourier acquisition). RSD first pretrains a corruption aware diffusion teacher on the observed measurements, then distills it into an efficient one step generator whose samples are statistically closer to the clean distribution p_X. The framework subsumes identity corruption (denoising task) as a special case of our general formulation. Empirically, RSD consistently reduces Frechet Inception Distance (FID) relative to corruption aware diffusion teachers across noisy generation (CIFAR 10, FFHQ, CelebA HQ, AFHQ v2), image restoration (Gaussian deblurring, random inpainting, super resolution, and mixtures with additive noise), and multi coil MRI without access to any clean images. The distilled generator inherits one step sampling efficiency, yielding up to 30x speedups over multi step diffusion while surpassing the teachers after substantially fewer training iterations. These results establish score distillation as a practical tool for generative modeling from corrupted data, not merely for acceleration. We provide theoretical support for the use of distillation in enhancing generation quality in the Appendix.

Yasi Zhang
Tianyu Chen
Zhendong Wang
Ying Nian Wu
Mingyuan Zhou
Oscar Leong


CleanPatrick: A Benchmark for Image Data Cleaning

Abstract: Robust machine learning depends on clean data, yet current image data cleaning benchmarks rely on synthetic noise or narrow human studies, limiting comparison and real-world relevance. We introduce CleanPatrick, the first large-scale benchmark for data cleaning in the image domain, built upon the publicly available Fitzpatrick17k dermatology dataset. We collect 496,377 binary annotations from 933 medical crowd workers, identify off-topic samples (4%), near-duplicates (21%), and label errors (32%), and employ an aggregation model inspired by item-response theory followed by expert review to derive high-quality ground truth. CleanPatrick formalizes issue detection as a ranking task and employs standard ranking metrics that mirror real audit workflows. We benchmark classical anomaly detectors, perceptual hashing, SSIM, Confident Learning, NoiseRank, FINE, BHN, and SelfClean. On CleanPatrick, self-supervised representations excel at near-duplicate detection, classical methods achieve competitive off-topic detection under constrained review budgets, and detecting implausible labels under conservative human judgment remains challenging for fine-grained medical classification. By releasing both the dataset and the evaluation framework, CleanPatrick enables a systematic comparison of image-cleaning strategies.

Fabian Gröger
Simone Lionetti
Philippe Gottfrois
Alvaro Gonzalez-Jimenez
Ludovic Amruthalingam
Elisabeth Victoria Goessinger
Hanna Lindemann
Marie Bargiela
Marie Hofbauer
Omar Badri
Philipp Tschandl
Arash Koochek
Matthew Groh
Alexander A. Navarini
Marc Pouly


RouteNator: A Router-Based Multi-Modal Architecture for Generating Synthetic Training Data for Function Calling LLMs

Abstract: This paper addresses fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for function calling tasks when real user interaction data is unavailable. In digital content creation tools, where users express their needs through natural language queries that must be mapped to API calls, the lack of real-world task-specific data and privacy constraints for training on it necessitate synthetic data generation. Existing approaches to synthetic data generation fall short in diversity and complexity, failing to replicate real-world data distributions and leading to suboptimal performance after LLM fine-tuning. We present a novel router-based architecture that leverages domain resources like content metadata and structured knowledge graphs, along with text-to-text and vision-to-text language models to generate high-quality synthetic training data. Our architecture's flexible routing mechanism enables synthetic data generation that matches observed real-world distributions, addressing a fundamental limitation of traditional approaches. Evaluation on a comprehensive set of real user queries demonstrates significant improvements in both function classification accuracy and API parameter selection. Models fine-tuned with our synthetic data consistently outperform traditional approaches, establishing new benchmarks for function calling tasks.

Vibha Belavadi
Tushar Vatsa
Dewang Sultania
Suhas Suresha
Ishita Verma
Cheng Chen
Tracy Holloway King
Michael Friedrich