用几何方法评估合成数据好坏,无需训练就能预测效果
Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

- 在预训练模型嵌入空间中,用差异向量表示数据集
- 投影误差越低,合成数据越能提升下游分类性能
- 适合医疗影像等正样本稀缺场景的合成数据质量评估
在医学影像和工业检测等实际计算机视觉任务中,二分类问题常面临正样本严重不足。常用解决方案是通过对负样本进行图像到图像转换生成合成正样本。然而,核心挑战在于如何可靠评估合成数据是否能提升下游模型性能。本文提出一种基于几何的度量方法,在不需模型训练的情况下预测合成数据效用。该方法在预训练基础模型的嵌入空间中,通过样本间的差异向量表示数据集,并测量线性分类器权重向量在这些差异向量张成子空间中的相对投影误差。直观上,若合成数据捕捉到任务相关方向,其张成空间可逼近分类器,投影误差低;反之则误差高。在多个数据集和架构上,该度量与混合真实负样本和合成正样本训练的CNN模型的下游分类性能呈现强相关性。结果表明,该度量可作为数据稀缺场景下合成数据质量评估的实用且信息丰富的工具。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.
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