Friday, March 25, 2022

When it comes to computer vision, can we ditch the datasets?

This seems to be an interesting approach (I have not yet read the paper)!

However, some form of garbage in, garbage out applies here as well. Whether at this time, generative models can replace real photos yet remains doubtful. Plus, we still lack better theoretical understanding how these model work.

"... This special machine-learning model, known as a generative model, requires far less memory to store or share than a dataset. Using synthetic data also has the potential to sidestep some concerns around privacy and usage rights that limit how some real data can be distributed. ..."

From the abstract:
"Generative models are now capable of producing highly realistic images that look nearly indistinguishable from the data on which they are trained. This raises the question: if we have good enough generative models, do we still need datasets? We investigate this question in the setting of learning general-purpose visual representations from a black-box generative model rather than directly from data. Given an off-the-shelf image generator without any access to its training data, we train representations from the samples output by this generator. We compare several representation learning methods that can be applied to this setting, using the latent space of the generator to generate multiple "views" of the same semantic content. We show that for contrastive methods, this multiview data can naturally be used to identify positive pairs (nearby in latent space) and negative pairs (far apart in latent space). We find that the resulting representations rival or even outperform those learned directly from real data, but that good performance requires care in the sampling strategy applied and the training method. Generative models can be viewed as a compressed and organized copy of a dataset ..."

When it comes to AI, can we ditch the datasets? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology A machine-learning model for image classification that’s trained using synthetic data can rival one trained on the real thing, a study shows.

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