Beyond Objects: Contextual Synthetic Data Generation for Fine-Grained
  Classification
Authors: name: William Yang; name: Xindi Wu; name: Zhiwei Deng; name: Esin Tureci; name: Olga Russakovsky
Published: 2025-10-28 05:40:14

Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models are increasingly used for synthetic dataset
generation, but generating effective synthetic training data for classification
remains challenging. Fine-tuning a T2I model with a few real examples can help
improve the quality of synthetic training data; however, it may also cause
overfitting and reduce diversity in the generated samples. We propose a
fine-tuning strategy BOB (BeyondOBjects) to mitigate these concerns for
fine-grained classification. Given a small set of real examples, we first
extract class-agnostic attributes such as scene background and object pose. We
then explicitly condition on these attributes during fine-tuning of the T2I
model and marginalize them out during generation. This design mitigates
overfitting, preserves the T2I model's generative prior, reduces estimation
errors, and further minimizes unintended inter-class associations. Extensive
experiments across multiple T2I models, backbones, and datasets show that our
method achieves state-of-the-art performance in low-shot fine-grained
classification when augmented with synthetic data. Concretely, BOB outperforms
DataDream by 7.4% on the Aircraft dataset (from 50.0% to 57.4% when fine-tuning
a CLIP classifier with five real images augmented with 100 synthetic images).
In three of the four benchmarks, fine-tuning downstream models with 5 real
images augmented with BOB achieves better performance than fine-tuning with 10
real images. Collectively, BOB outperforms prior art in 18 of 24 experimental
settings, with 2+% accuracy improvements in 14 of these settings.